Hello and welcome to Episode 3 of our Engage University video series! My name is Lauren Devens and I am the Digital Marketing & Social Media Coordinator at BNP Engage in Philadelphia. I’m here with the fabulous Tess Ewing who is our junior web developer. So, Tess, I’ll kick it over to you for a brief intro.
Thanks, Lauren. Hello everyone. I am Tess Ewing. I’m the Junior Web Developer here at BNP Engage. I’ve been working with BNP Engage for a little over three years now and been in development for just a little bit longer than that. Mostly self-taught. I have a degree in graphic design and decided that doing web stuff is more for me. So, yeah, excited to talk to you about the wonderful world of development and how that intersects with SEO!
Thanks so much, Tess. So, today we’re going to be talking a little bit about schema markup for websites.
What is schema for websites?
In a really broad sense, it’s a way of formatting data that Google can read and identify what kind of content you are putting out there on the web. So, it is a series of JSON text. It’s a way of writing the data to let Google know what kind of content you’re sharing and certain pieces of information that are specific to that kind of content.
So, that way, when you type something into Google, the first results that come up can say what kind of content it is. An event, for instance. If you’re searching for an event, an event schema would include the start time and the date of it. And those are the first results that you would see.
What are the benefits of using schema data?
There are certainly a lot of benefits, especially if you have content . For example, if you want to add the date into that first block of results, it makes it really easy for the person searching to get that data right away. They’ll learn about the content that you have worked so hard on and they get to know it really instantly what they’re looking for.
And because they are getting that information right away, it gives them more confidence to click on your content because they know. Yes, this is the event on this date. This is what I’m looking for. And then they will click on the result and browse all your content.
How can people generate schema markup?
So, like I mentioned, how it’s written in the JSON language you do not need to be a developer to do that. There’s so many different schema generators out in the world today. I think the one that we use most often is from Technical SEO. Basically, it will prompt you to choose the type of content.
And then, based on that, you will get different fields to enter. So, then, after you have entered all of the data of what the content is, it’ll generate it for you and then it is just some text that you will copy and paste onto your content. And Google takes care of the rest.
Learn more about website development
Thank you for joining us for our third episode of the Engage University Video Series! If you’re interested in learning more about website development, design, and marketing, make sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel. We’ll be sharing regular videos featuring members of our team discussing their insights.
If you have any questions, feel free to reach out to us to discuss your needs. We will see you in episode four!