Let's talk about Schema and Open Graph tags and why they are important for Local SEO and general usability of your website.
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What is Schema markup and why is it important for SEO?
Mike Zittel | SEO expert (00:04):
Hey, it's Mike with Serr.biz search engine ranking rules, S E R R dot B I Z. And today we're going to have a quick look at schema.org markup as well as open graph. Mark-Up so, what is it? What is schema markup and what does open graph? Both are little bits of code that get added to the code of your website. You never actually see it, but it's there and it's important to be there. The reason schema in particular is very important is one Google really, really, really likes schema markup. It helps them classify and index your website. Additionally, when you have schema properly implemented on your websites you can get better search appearances in Google. Let's go take a look. So over here on Google search results, we quickly just did a search for a pizza dough recipe because I knew pizza recipe would produce some results that have the specialized appearances that I was just talking about, that are caused by having good schema on your website.
Mike Zittel | SEO expert (01:17):
And specifically right here, you see, let's just take a look at this first listing. The best pizza dough recipe [unintelligible] and notice how the ratings of all the people who voted on that particular recipe, that particular article is showing up right here. That's created through schema org markup that you put onto your website. If you don't have it, you're guaranteed never to have a little bit of ratings on the search results, but additionally, they have schema markup throughout their site. And these other pages of the site links as they're called, are showing up. Technically speaking, you don't have to have schema to rank in the search engines. However pretty much all the top players do have schema. And if you don't have schema these pretty much are never going to show up for you. So that's a good reason to have a schema.org markup in your website.
Schema gives Google additional information about your website in a format Google likes
Mike Zittel | SEO expert (02:20):
It's another place to just give more information about your page and a format that Google really, really likes so that they can understand your page and rank it. Now regarding open graph tags, open graph tags are specifically designed for Facebook and Facebook properties. It's a very similar to your standard title tag and your meta description tag, et cetera. It's just that when you use the open graph tag, you're specifically telling Facebook what the title is, the description. And so in the link and the image that you want to be seen when someone shares a link to your website over in Facebook, et cetera. So that's all that it is. It's important though, even though it doesn't directly impact your search engine optimization, Google does not read that information and use it as part of how they're going to rank you in the search engines.
Does Google use Open Graph tags for SEO?
Mike Zittel | SEO expert (03:20):
At least that's according to Google's official status. Wink. Wink. So my opinion is it's just really good. One just on the social side effects, right? So you're going to get, people are going to share your pages. They're going to, you're going to get a nice image, a nice description. You are going to control your branding. People are going to click it like it, share it themselves, link to it. It's a good way to get more traffic to your site and get more backlinks. But officially Google says they do not use it. It's as good to have. Now, how do you implement it? Well, that gets to be a little trickier, open graphs, not so bad. Most content management systems, the templates auto-generate open graph data. However, schema.org data often is not part of the content management systems out of the box.
Do content management systems have Schema by default?
Mike Zittel | SEO expert (04:17):
You're going to probably have to implement some type of plugin for your website. I know WordPress, you can get open graph and a schema markup plugins. I think Yoast does it. Joomla there's a handful of them that will do it. The one hosted content solution that I know of that does have some scheme of functionality is Duda. Duda by default has your basic local business profile schema markup. And it also has a FAQ markup. If you want additional schema markup for like articles or videos, et cetera they have an upgrade that you can get. And again, the nice thing about Duda is you don't have to mess around with actually doing the plugins and dealing with software. It's just kind of an on or off type function paid for or not. If you don't want to pay for it, but you still want it over on schema or over on Duda there's a function where you can just add custom code.
Mike Zittel | SEO expert (05:17):
So you could go to any number of free schema, markup generators, generate your code, copy paste, to go back over to your do, to site and paste it in. And we'll get into that a little bit more further on in this tutorial. But right now what's important is that, you know that you need it and you want it and that you can get it. But now the final question is, do you want to do it, or do you want your webmaster to do it? And if you don't know, if you already have it or not there's a couple of links in the description below that you can use to just test your site and you can test it for schema markup in when you
How do I know if my site has schema and open graph?
Mike Zittel | SEO expert (05:58):
Run the test, it'll tell you if there's schema on there. And it also tells you if it's valid or not. Because like I said, schema, it gets a little bit complicated and it's pretty easy to cause an error if it's not done right. And if you do see an error, you can just go back and fix it. Anyway. You don't want to go too much further with it. Other than you want it, you need it. You want to test your site with the links below to see if you have schema and you want to test your site to see if you have open graph. And if you don't have those, then you want to find out how to implement them on your site and or hire an expert. For some help. All right, next up, we're going to talk about XML site maps and Google search console. Thanks for watching. My name is Mike, and if you have any questions, please leave a comment below. I'll answer as soon as possible. Thanks, bye.
Google Schema Testing Tool https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/structured-data
Facebook Open Graph Testing Tool https://developers.facebook.com/tools/debug/
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