Structured data is a technique to inform search engines about the content of a website in an organized and specified way, which allows for better organization and matching of search results.
Schema.org and their definitions of elements, which can be described, are the most commonly used method. With their schemas, one can describe both physical objects such as products, people, or places, as well as intangible objects like organizations, concerts, or recipes. The schemas are precisely described on the https://schema.org website, where it is clearly defined which elements are required and which are optional.
Schema.org is a collaboration between the largest search engines: Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, and Yandex. Therefore, one can be sure that schema.org is supported by these four search engines.
Benefits of implementing these schemas?
By using one of the Schema.org schemas, search engines can fully understand the key elements of the schema. For example, if a concert is described on a page, it is precisely defined where, when, and who is performing.
Thanks to this, search engines can extract important information to their search results and highlight the most important information.
Such results in search engines are called “Rich Snippets” – in Poland, they are often referred to as “Structured Data” or “Microdata”.
Table of contents
How to get these “Rich Snippets”?
Schema.org offers three ways to implement Rich Snippets:
- Microdata
- RDFa
- JSON-LD
- JSON-LD is a JSON format specifically created for defining structured data on a website.
What do Structured Data do?
The most common application of structured data is the “breadcrumb trail”, which shows search engines where a given page is located in the website’s structure.
For an online store, the most important schema is the one that allows you to define products.
A full description of a product can be found at https://schema.org/Product.
The product image displayed in the search results on mobile devices is not Rich Snippets. It is a product photo, but Google finds the photo on the site and decides to display it in the results on mobile devices.
