Search engines are constantly evolving and becoming more discriminating of the content they present to users. While content writing has previously been focused on keywords, which are still extremely important, search engine crawlers have developed a new appetite for munching Microdata.
What is Microdata?
Microdata is one of the three variations of data used by engine crawlers to determine the relevancy of a website and the content writing compared to a user’s search. While HTML tags, such as <h1>Elliott </h1>, are great at telling the browser how to display the information, it doesn’t offer crawlers any real information about the meaning of the text string, Elliott. As a result, search engine crawlers haven’t been able to intelligently deliver content relevant to a search.
To remedy this problem, Microdata or schema tags are used to explain or clarify text strings for crawlers. For example, Microdata or schema tags could be added to explain that the text string “Elliott” is referring to a person and not a movie or a graphic image. Simply put, Microdata is responsible for clarifying exactly what your content is referring to, such as a recipe or vehicle instead of a movie or school.
The Benefits of Integrating Microdata in Your Content Writing
In addition to the clarification benefits mentioned previously, including Microdata in your website’s code ensures search engines have enough information to create rich snippets. Rich snippets appear on the search engine results page (SERP) and entice users to click the highlighted link by providing more than the standard amount of information. For example, a Google search using Microdata tags for “fried green tomatoes recipe” could offer users an image of savory fried green tomatoes, user rating stars, and even cooking times. If a user was searching for this recipe, they would be more inclined to click the link with rich snippets instead of a the traditional listing with the website’s meta description, title, and URL.
Who Should Use Microdata?
Simply put, every small businesses can undoubtedly benefit from Microdata. More so, businesses experiencing problems generating traffic from search engines should highly consider implementing Microdata in their code. In addition, the rich snippets will make any business stand out over the competition, which results in more traffic.
Can Microdata Improve My SEO Rank?
Embedding Microdata in your code will undoubtedly allow the search engine crawlers to understand your website’s content. As a result, the visibility of your page could be increased. While Bing does reward sites implementing microdata schema tags in its search engine results, Google doesn’t at the time.
In any case, using Microdata is proven to increase your click-through-rate or CTR. For that reason, several national and international case studies suggest that implementing structured markup such as Microdata can result in an up to 30% increase in a site’s CTR. With the direct correlation between CTR and SEO, the increase in CTR could effectively increase your page’s rank over time.
Elliott C believes the key to success in content writing is always being in the know and doing the next best thing. With the world of SEO and content marketing swiftly changing, he spends an arduous amount of time researching new trends.
