What is Structured Data and Why is it Important for your Website

Data is the new big thing for Google this year. Structured Data is the most important part of your website content. At the start of this year, Google announced that they are considering data more seriously. Google cracks the time-to-time update on its search algorithm.

Google did not share its search algorithm with anyone. There are the records (interviews) that the google webmaster team told about the new things happening in the coming year.

Let’s discuss what is structured data and why you should consider it for your website.
 

Structured Data

Structured data is data that is well-organized and developed by considering the defined schema for a set of structures. It provides you with a set of patterns or structures to organize your content as expected by search engines.

That set of patterns are properties that are given by Schema.org. There is a distinct schema for every type of content that you gonna structure. The content may be your simple text, an article, a video, a post, a page, a product, or any type of content that is part of your website.

Like, for example, if you want to develop a structure for your product then go to the schema.org-> product directory. Here you get the structure for that specific type of content i.e., for your product in this case.

You have to add the concerned structure to that particular content type. There are different properties available that you have to add in your structure(HTML tags).

Google Structured Data

Three different languages understand by a computer program, here we are considering Google. These three languages/ways are

Microdata: From W3C, it’s a way to structure the elements by giving more details to the element itself.

Microformats: To add semantics to your markup tags of HTML/XHTML via attributes that provide you additional metadata.

RDFa: That adds the set of attribute-level extensions to your structure (HTM/XHTML/ any other XML-based documents).

As far as Google is concerned, it highly appreciates and understands the pattern or set of properties that are given by Schema.org. Schema.org is the most adopted structured data schema that is contributed by the major players (Search Engine). Moreover, the future of structured data will be on Schema.org.

Why Structured Data is Important for your Websites

Structure Data is very important for your websites because this is what, Google ranks and can make the rich snippet of content display on search results or ads by Google( where it needs it).

Like, for example, the title, and description property added to your webpage structure will be displayed on the search result.

John Mueller (WebMaster Trends Analyst at Google Switzerland) said that if you have some heading along with the description then, Google will also emphasize as you do.
 

Other benefits of using Structured data in your websites are:

Content Understanding

Now, it is useful to understand the content of Google.

Highlighting your Data

The more structured data you used, the more Google will highlight it in its search result and rank it.

Chances of Better CTR

As your content is highly organized and structured, that’s why it is better to understand the core description of any link that is asked by users on search engines.

Useful for Programmer/Developer

You can easily understand the code if your data is structured. Now, any other developer can understand the code, because it’s well-structured and organized.

Customization of your PPC Searched ads

It gonna help you in customizing PPC search ads.

Automating the ads

The keywords you used in your structured data will help you in automating the creation of totally relevant and customizable ads on your website.

Like, if you added the keywords in your structured data, then you can add them to your ad settings. So, it will display the relevant ads according to your keywords.

It will equally beneficial for you and the other party with the link that is associated with that ad. In the end,  what Google will rate is your keywords, not the search queries.

You have to check for the error on the Live Google Structured Data Testing Tool and you will find the real error and warning in your code.

What’s New for Structured Data in 2017

Gary Illyes told in the relevant discussion about ranking and search quality in an interview. In 2017, they are more concerned about Machine learning. The other things they pointed out are AMP Pages and then structured data. 

What about AMP?

AMP is an Accelerated Mobile page that is going to rock the next year. It is the way you can automate and accelerate the pages on your mobile devices. It will rank as well as boost your site performance.

To enable it on your website, log in to your Google webmaster console and enable it on the AMP tab. This is done by adding the files in your code. The given link will let you know how to use it in HTML, JavaScript, or AMP CDN.

There is news about the AMP that your AMP Pages will no longer need Structured data to be valid in the Google Search console. It will no longer block or break the rule to make your webpage higher on search rank if its structured data is unorganized. Regardless you used AMP in your code.

Conclusion

Considering the real facts and figures, the importance of Structured data can’t lose its place. Gary Illyes( Webmaster Trends Analyst at Google) pointed out that regardless of all the other emerging things, structured data is as important as it was earlier.

The core algorithm is now taken over by machine learning. Structured data has the same place in leads. On emphasizing, he said that of course, AMP is also obvious (as more and more websites and moving towards it.