What is Schema?

Let’s start with the understanding what Snippet is. 

When the user does a search, Google always displays the pages' meta tags, which are made up of their title (title tag), URL and a description (the meta description), as in the example below: 

All those features that appear on the link search result are snippets. 

The objective of it is to inform the user about what he will find when he clicks on the link. And that's why it's so important that this information is properly optimized. Check out how to do it at this link.  

In 2009, Google introduced “Rich snippets” into search results. They were adopted by search engines to provide the user with more information directly on the SERP (Search Engine Results Page). In this way, it is possible to show more details about the pages. 

Schema is a vocabulary of structured data on web pages, which defines entities, actions and relationships (web pages, emails, etc), so the schemas makes the easier for the serach engines fill the search results with the best information (about the link or grant information to the user). 

Schema.org (schema.org) was an initiative launched in 2011 by Google, Bing, Yahoo!, the main search engines at the time, with the purpose of creating and supporting a common group of schemas (snippet patterns) for marking up this structured data. 

Here are some examples of Google results with Schemas: 

Rating Snippet 

Local Business 

Event

Recipes 

Why is Schema important? 

When Google understands websites at a deeper level, it provides users with better results. Structured data vocabulary (Schema) makes search engines understand the meanings in content and provide a better experience for users. 

It is important that your site contains the Schema, because as Google continues to build a more semantic web, that is, it understands and makes updates to improve the UX (User Experience), these tags become more and more valuable to the company. effective communication on the Internet. 

Thanks to the schema, Google can complement the site's search results with additional information in the form of Rich Snippets, which, in addition to creating more eye-catching results and helps with the ranking, are proven to help the click-through rate in organic search results. 

“Google Search works hard to understand the content of a page. You can help us by providing explicit clues about the meaning of a page to Google by including structured data on the page. Structured data is a standardized format for providing information about a page and classifying the page content; for example, on a recipe page, what are the ingredients, the cooking time and temperature, the calories, and so on. 

Google uses structured data that it finds on the web to understand the content of the page, as well as to gather information about the web and the world in general.” 

This snippet is taken from Google's documentation “Understand how structured data works”. 2022, May. 

Schema markup types 

The schema.org vocabulary includes several formats for structuring data, such as recipes, videos, images, articles, FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions), etc. And you will choose the ones that make the most sense for your site or page. For example, suppose you have a FAQ page and you have entered schema markup. Schema results for FAQ appear like this:  

Note that for each question there is an answer snippet with a link that leads to the page. 

See this Google example page about structured data for “FAQ” - Frequently Asked Questions. In it you will find two ways to implement: JSON-LD and Microdata. In the category on the left side menu “Resources Guide” there are examples for each of the Schema types. Just change the exemplified information, such as “example.com” for your domain, etc. 

For more information, also check out Google's Guide to Rich Snippets by clicking here and Google's Rich Snippets examples here. 

Test Tools 

To make sure the Schema was entered correctly on the site, use a testing tool to crawl your site and alert you to any misuse of markup language, such as Google’s Structured Data Testing Tool do Google. Just copy and paste the URL you want to analyze.