Schema

Schema markup is code or structured data that helps search engines more easily classify and display a page’s contents.

There is an unfathomable amount of data on the internet, complicating search engines’ ability to provide the ideal search results for their users. In response to this challenge, search giants Google, Bing, Yahoo! and Yandex collaborated to create schema markup, which allows publishers to better communicate their content to the search engines.

Common examples of schema markup include:

• Rich reviews
• Snippets
• Events
• Carousels
• Recipes
• Breadcrumbs
• FAQs
• How-Tos

If you were looking for a recipe for Chicken Tikka Masala on Google, wouldn’t you be more likely to click on a link that mentions the cooking time, has a snippet of ingredients as well as a user rating?

Schema allows search engines to display your web page in the rich-content format. See the below example to see what we mean.

If we use Schema.org’s validator tool to check the tasty.co link’s JSON-LD structured data (schema) snippet, we can see it looks like this:

Source

We’ll talk more about the different design languages used in structured data a little later, but for now, let’s focus on the above example.

As you can see in this snapshot, highlighted in yellow, all the relevant information — type, title, date published, date modified, author, ingredients, etc. — are clear cues to the search engines on how to display the page and make it more appealing to searchers.