What is the optimum schema for a Website and how important is it really is for SEO?
-
Hey everyone,
As you all probably has seen Google has changed their structure testing tool and alongside that has also changed what is considered as valid and not valid.I have been struggling with this question for quite a while now where opinions are really split.
**1. How important is Schema for SEO? **
2. How far should you go Schema'ing your website pages?From the one hand i can see how it can be easier for a BOT to read a code that has proper "road signs" (our schemas markups), on the other hands, Google is already extremely clever is working out what is the header, sidebar or footer as well as review and or a blog posts (especially for those of us who use Wordpress.
Would love to know if someone has seen a "Like to Like" show case with schemas and/or have some factual information regarding what should or shouldn't be done when it comes ot Schema.
Dan.
-
So your footer links, top nav bar, are only visible in code? But can you see them on the page?
To elaborate on my answer, I feel that schema markups for links in the footer, sidebar and top nav are irrelevant and not worth exhausting the effort. What benefit does the markup have to the user? The markups should highlight the most important parts of your site for the benefit of the searcher, not the search engine. Therefore my answer is really that same, put yourself in the shoes of the searcher. Is there something in those links worth highlighting that could possibly increase your CTR? My guess is that there probably isn't. Without seeing your site, I couldn't really assume otherwise.
The benefit is not to the engine as these markups are for user experience alone. Highlighting the data won't help you rank better if it is irrelevant to the searcher.
-
Hi Monica,
Although i appricate your comment and although it was Staff Endorsed here on Moz i think it was a very general answer that doesn't touch the core of my question.and i will explain, whilst i agree with you 100% regarding the fact that one should add Schema markups to the things that are important on your site it didn't answer the dipper question of combining the front end and back end when it comes to Schema. In other words, by defining schema for sidebards, top menus, footer etc. (all of which which are only visible to search engines bots on a code level) are we helping our SEO efforts? is Google going to award us for taking the time and specifying schema throughout elements that are not your usual suspects (Review, Ratings, Products etc.)?
I hope i get my point/question across, as we both share the same principles it is not clear from your comment what level of technical code level schema should be implemented.
Dan.
-
I believe the Schema markups are better for user experience, which is why they are important to SEO. What is the point of having a completely optimized site and great content if you can't get anyone to click on your SERP? This is especially true for ECommerce stores. Those markups give the customers the first glimpse of a price and the quality of a product, and, can often drastically increase CTR.
You should add Schema markups to the things that are important on your site, prices, brands, reviews; the things that are more important to the searcher. What is good for the searcher is good for the search engine. Highlight the things that you have over your competition. Highlight the things you want to be recognized for, like promotions or guarantees. The benefit of the markups should be thought of as what is good for the searcher, not the bots.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Do old website files in the public_html effect SEO?
My client has about a dozen old folders filled with old websites including index files, robots, htaccess files. They are all located in separate files with in public_html. Does this effect them negatively?
Technical SEO | | Renalynd0 -
Relaunching website seo audit
Hi People, We are going to Relaunch the website(https://www.y-axis.com). Url remains the same; the website has good SEO (Ranking, Leads, Traffic...). Website skin (layout, content) is going to change.Hence, would like to know the precautions to secure SEO. Please provide us necessary SEO Checklist for the above request.
Technical SEO | | Anshul.S1 -
Is there any SEO benefit to pulling a picture from another website and linking to it from a blog?
For example, if blog.mountainmedia.com were to link a product picture directly to mountainmedia.com. Would this be considered a high quality backlink?
Technical SEO | | MountainMedia0 -
E-ccomerce SEO conundrum
I work on the marketing for an eccomerce website. And lately we have been having an issue with the "wrong" page ranking and the right page "being nearly unfindable." For example the product bit o honey - there is a brand page, category page and individual product pages. We want the category page to be the top level bit o honey "hub" page and have placed all of the products onto it. We've written a nice description about Bit O Honey on that page and spent time running social campaigns around that page to try and get social activity on page as well. There have even been a few back links from blogs or reviews onto that category page. It also has the highest page authority among all of the bit o honey pages. But for some odd reason it is always the absolute last result among the 3 options when i search? In fact the only time I can even find it is if I type in about 3 sentences worth of text from that page and it find exact match. I'm really pretty confused as to why the highest page authority page with the most content, activity and link profile, would have the worst ranking capability among the three nearly identical pages.
Technical SEO | | Jonathan_Murrell0 -
.lbi file - SEO friendly or not?
Up until yesterday afternoon i had never heard of a .lbi file. It turns out it is a library file used by Adobe Dreamweaver. From what i can tell it works like a client side included but i am unsure of the technology behind it. The issue:
Technical SEO | | kchandler
When running through a recent SEO audit for a new client i found these .lbi files being used all over there site for site wide callouts and even navigation. When viewing this content through firebug or in the browser you can see the executed HTML content but when viewing the source or the page in seo-browser.com the content is nowhere to be seen. So my thought is this is not SEO friendly and is the same as displaying content in any client-side script like JavaScript or JQuery. Any feedback or thoughts on this subject would be awesome, especially if anyone has used these previously. Unfortunately i cannot share the client site but i would be more than happy to answer any questions if more detail is needed. Thanks in advance - Kyle0 -
How To SEO Mobile Pages?
hello, I have finally put my first foot on the path of trying to learn and understand mobile SEO. I have a few questions regarding mobile SEO and how it works, so please help me out. I use wordpress for my site, and there is a nifty plugin called WP touch http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wptouch/ What it basically does is, it converts your desktop version into a mobile friendly version. I wanted to know that if it does that, does this mean whatever SEO i do for my regular web site gets accomplished for my moible version as well? Another simple question is, if i search for the same term on my mobile phone then on my desktop how different will the SERs be? thanks moz peeps
Technical SEO | | david3050 -
Seo on a dk site
hi my client has asked if we can seo their dk site , my question is does all link building and article submission have to be in danish
Technical SEO | | Westernoriental0 -
Website has been penalized?
Hey guys, We have been link building and optimizing our website since the beginning of June 2010. Around August-September 2010, our site appeared on second page for the keywords we were targeting for around a week. They then dropped off the radar - although we could still see our website as #1 when searching for our company name, domain name, etc. So we figured we had been put into the 'google sandbox' sort of thing. That was fine, we dealt with that. Then in December 2010, we appeared on the first page for our keywords and maintained first page rankings, even moving up the top 10 for just over a month. On January 13th 2011, we disappeared from Google for all of the keywords we were targeting, we don't even come up in the top pages for company name search. Although we do come up when searching for our domain name in Google and we are being cached regularly. Before we dropped off the rankings in January, we did make some semi-major changes to our site, changing meta description, changing content around, adding a disclaimer to our pages with click tracking parameters (this is when SEOmoz prompted us that our disclaimer pages were duplicate content) so we added the disclaimer URL to our robots.txt so Google couldn't access it, we made the disclaimer an onclick link instead of href, we added nofollow to the link and also told Google to ignore these parameters in Google Webmaster Central. We have fixed the duplicate content side of things now, we have continued to link build and we have been adding content regularly. Do you think the duplicate content (for over 13,000 pages) could have triggered a loss in rankings? Or do you think it's something else? We index pages meta description and some subpages page titles and descriptions. We also fixed up HTML errors signaled in Google Webmaster Central and SEOmoz. The only other reason I think we could have been penalized, is due to having a link exchange script on our site, where people could add our link to their site and add theirs to ours, but we applied the nofollow attribute to those outbound links. Any information that will help me get our rankings back would be greatly appreciated!
Technical SEO | | bigtimeseo0