What is Schema.org?

Hi, I’m Mike Essex, the Online Marketing Manager here at Koozai. Today I’m going to talk to you about Schema.org and what that means for websites.

Now today’s video came from a question that Richard Shove asked at OMD, which is, “What is Schema, and how can it help?”. Schema is a set of codes that you can add to your website to tag content. So we’ve had this before with Meta tags and vCards and rich snippets, and this is no different.

The only element of this that’s changed is that Google, Yahoo, and Bing have worked together to create this code so you know that it’s going to be read the same way by all the search engines, which is great because some of those other elements could be neglected by some engines. If you added a lot of Meta tags to a page, it could count against you, because of all the redundant code that some of the engines wouldn’t use.

You also know that Schema code is going to be read by the three core search engines, which is fantastic. So you can tag various types of content, such as events, organisations, people, places, and reviews of products. There are loads more on Schema.org as well, so you can really take your pick.

If you add these tags, it means that when people search for those kinds of terms, you’re going to have a little bit of extra information in the search engines, which can make a lot of difference. The down side is that everything that you tag could appear in the search engine results. Therefore, if you tag reviews, for example, and someone leaves a one star negative review on one of your pages, people aren’t then going to click through on that result to learn more. That’s going to count against you. So even if you’ve got loads of positive reviews on other pages and you tag a negative review, it’s going to count against you. So just bear that in mind when you apply these tags.

The other thing to do is to check your click-through rate in Webmaster Tools for these kinds of terms. If you see that less people are clicking, it could very well be that the Schema.org tag is working against you. Likewise in analytics, if you notice less traffic for a term that you’ve maintained a ranking for, it could also be the Schema tag is having a negative effect. So add a few of these tags to your website and see what happens. Don’t go crazy. Don’t tag your entire website in one go without analyzing it or tracking the results.

After you’ve tagged your website, be sure to let us know how you get on at Koozai.com. Good or bad, we’d love to hear your experiences. You can learn more information about Koozai on Twitter, Facebook or YouTube.