The old days of pumping your website full of metatags and embedding ridiculous code to improve your search rank are over. Google, Yahoo, and Bing are all too smart with their fancy algorithms to let you get away with that. If you want to get found in search without paying a ton of money, you have to cram your website with great content.
This content can be anything your users find valuable: pictures, videos, links to other awesome articles, your own thoughts. The problem with pictures and videos and your own thoughts is that these algorithms can’t see them, and they’re not always sure about the context. This is important, because while content is king, context is God.
Lucky for us, the geniuses over at schema.org have created these incredibly confusing, but even more incredibly useful Schemas. If you’re serious about SEO, and you should be, you’ll need to utilize them as much as possible.
“Great! How do I use them?” you might say to me. Well, they’re sets of HTML code you can use to give context to something extremely abstract. For example, if you’re writing about a movie directed by someone named John Smith, there’s no way the spiders crawling your site will know that he’s directing a movie. Therefore, no one searching for John Smith, movie director, will find you.
This is where the Schemas come into play. By adding the movie schema code to that bit of your article, and adding the director code around John Smith’s name, the spider crawling your page will know EXACTLY what you’re talking about. On the surface, readers will see John Smith, Director, and search engines will see the same on the back end.
You can have the best content in the world, all of the stuff that readers love, but it’s not always the same stuff search engines love. Using Schemas ensure that we’re all on the same page.
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