How Companies Find You Online is Changing in 2016! Find Out How to Assure Your Company is Easily Found

Every day, Google gets a little bit better at determining a website’s value in response to a user’s query. As a result, rankings fluctuate, and search engine optimizers like us spend a lot of time speculating on what SEO will look like next week, next month, and next year.
2015 is quickly coming to a close, and we’ve begun making plans for SEO in 2016. We’re reading between the lines, looking at what Google changed this year, and taking in the bits of information Google has given us in order to make predictions that will guide our work in January and beyond. Here’s what we think so far:

#1: The more things change, the more they stay the same.

When I was first learning SEO in 2006, I read the words “content is king” more times than I can count. Ten years later, content is still the single most important element of search engine optimization, and publishing unique, relevant, useful content that real people value (and share) is the best way to succeed at SEO. This was as true in 2006 as it will be in 2016. Content marketing strategies change over time, but creating quality articles, guides, videos, infographics, and blog posts is the first step toward the top of Google’s search results.

#2: Mobile is going to matter more.

In April, Google rolled out a mobile-friendly update to its algorithm. This change was highly anticipated by SEO professionals, and so many sites had time to prepare (and avoid the consequences). The sites that didn’t bother to update to a responsive design or design for mobile stopped appearing at the top of Google’s search results on smartphones. SEOs speculate that we haven’t seen the last mobile-friendliness update from Google. In fact, we expect that responsive design will become even more important in 2016 as more and more users research, shop, plan, and interact on their smartphones.

#3: Google is going to tell us less.

We’ve already seen huge cut-backs in terms of how much information Google is willing to give us about our visitors. Google Analytics reports most keywords as “not provided” these days, making it extremely difficult to see whether or not our SEO efforts are paying off. Now Google is adding “Dark Traffic” to its “Direct Traffic” numbers. This means that any time Google can’t readily identify a traffic source, it shows up as Direct Traffic. As more and more people interact with various apps, messaging programs, and other tools, we can expect these numbers to grow – and we can expect to be in the dark when it comes to knowing which efforts are really driving traffic. 2016 may be the time to invest in a paid analytics service like Moz.

#4: We’re going to be competing with Google itself for placement on the SERPs.

If you haven’t already noticed, Google has spent this past year making their search results (and likely, their pockets) much richer. Today’s searchers often don’t need to leave Google to find the answers they’re seeking. Things like game scores, factual information like definitions or math equations, and other tidbits pop up at the top of the SERPs, keeping users right where Google wants them. Maps listings, carousels with local business information and images, and other rich snippets are taking up more of Google’s real estate, making it even harder for site to get found organically. As Google continues to give itself a bigger share of its own results pages, SEOs will have to seek out clever ways to achieve the ranks they need.

#5: Factors that previously haven’t mattered are going to make a big difference.

For a long time, Google’s official policy stated that click-through-rate (how many people visit your site after seeing it in their search results), social signals, and engagement metrics didn’t play a role in a site’s rankings. As 2016 approaches, Google has given us reason to believe that things may be about to change. Social signals like “likes,” “shares” and Tweets are a good indication of how much users value your content, and so they’re an obvious choice for Google to factor into its algorithm. Similarly, CTR and engagement (how long a user visited and how many pages they looked at on your site) offer a potential indication of how well your site answers a particular query. Google is all about developing an algorithm that mimics natural search behavior, and all these metrics will only further that goal. Once again, SEOs who want to succeed need more than just technical know-how. They need to be experts at digital marketing and content.

The Basics of Search Engine Optimization for Your Shopify Store

our store is up and running and you’re starting to see visitors trickle in. There’s definitely interest in the products you're selling, as well as your business as a whole.
But something's missing when you check your store dashboard – you aren’t seeing any visits from organic search. Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo, and all the other search engines are totally off your radar.
The thing is, you know search traffic is important to any business, you just don't know where to begin to use search as a marketing tool. Why should you be paying attention to search traffic anyways?
In this post, we’ll take a look at search engine optimization for your Shopify store, and some best practices you can begin to employ so you can see your traffic and business grow.

The Importance of Search Engine Optimization

Wikipedia defines SEO as "the process of affecting the visibility of a website or a web page in a search engine's unpaid results - often referred to as "natural," "organic," or "earned" results."
A potential customer searches a term or keyword related to your business or product, and as a business owner your goal is to be the first result(s) on search results.

There's buzz of SEO being dead with the rise of social media, email marketing, and paid advertising. The truth is, search isn’t going away any time soon – especially with the continued growth of mobile search, in-app search, and more.

Besides the fact that SEO is here to stay, it’s also a fairly cost-effective marketing play. While paid advertising can provide direct, almost instant traffic (and maybe sales) – it can get costly very quickly. So SEO may be the ticket when it comes to a lesser investment depending on your business, and goals.

Search Engine Watch reported that a research study by Optify discovered that “websites ranked number one received an average click-through rate (CTR) of 36.4 percent" - that's huge potential for traffic and sales depending on the keywords you're targeting!

Yes, it can take some time for you to really start seeing results with SEO if you're doing it all yourself, and it has the potential to get expensive if you're outsourcing the work – but it ensures you’re in the game for the long-run, and that you're producing quality content.

Let’s take a look at how your Shopify store is optimized for SEO, and some tips and tricks to ensure you’re getting the most out of it.

Search Engine Optimization and Shopify

As a Shopify store owner, you’re already ahead of the game. No matter what plan you’re on, Shopify includes powerful SEO features like:

• editable title tags, meta descriptions and URLs for your pages
• editable ALT tags for all images, customizable image file names
• automatically generated sitemap.xml and robots.txt files
• automatically generated canonical URL tags (to stop duplicate content).

So, what does all that mean? Here are some standard definitions from MOZ's SEO guide, as well as our official documentation on search engine optimization 101 to get you started:
Title tags are often used on search engine results pages (SERPs) to display preview snippets for a given page, and are important both for SEO and social sharing. The title element of a web page is meant to be an accurate and concise description of a page's content.

Meta descriptions are HTML attributes that provide concise explanations of the contents of web pages. Meta descriptions are commonly used on search engine result pages (SERPs) to display preview snippets for a given page.

The image's filename and alt text are used to describe a picture's contents. Having descriptive alt text can help your product images show up when customers search for images. As well, alt text is an important accessibility feature: it describes your product images to people who have visual impairments.

Your sitemap.xml file contains all your products, pages, collections, and blog posts.

The robots exclusion protocol (REP), or robots.txt is a text file webmasters create to instruct robots (typically search engine robots) how to crawl and index pages on their website.
With those settings and features defined, let's next take a look at how they can be applied to your Shopify store.

Optimizing Your Shopify Store for Growth

 

While Shopify does cover most of the basics of search engine optimization for you by default, you can take advantage of powerful features to extend the potential of your store's organic search reach.
Here are a few of many different things you can tweak on your store:

Title tags

You can edit the title tag of your online store in addition to setting the title tag for each product, collection, or page in Shopify. Simply scroll down to the Search engines section on these pages in Shopify to make any necessary adjustments.

Meta descriptions

Another great trick, is to modify the meta descriptions. Shopify will automatically pull text from your page, but you can customize the meta description manually to fit your marketing goals. The meta description can be set for your homepage as well as other pages, collections, and blog posts using the Shopify admin.

Page headers (h1)

It is important that you include your main keywords in the names of your store's products, collections, pages, or blog posts. For example, if you are selling a red t-shirt with your store brand on it, you'll want to set the product's name to something like "McFadden's T-Shirt - Red". This will make your web page more likely show up when people search for words like "McFadden's", "t-shirt", and "red t-shirt".

Content is king

The more content you write in your product description, collection text, or blog post, the better chance your page will be found on Google and other search engines. Try to write a few paragraphs of text with some of your main keywords included.

Try an app

There are plenty of different apps available in the Shopify App Store that can help make your life easier when it comes to all of the intricacies of search engine optimization. Be sure to play around with some of the apps to see which one suits your business needs.
While I suggest playing around with all of these features yourself to get a better understanding of how search engine optimization works, there's no harm in getting expert help. If you are looking to hire someone to give you a hand, be sure to take a look at our Shopify Marketing Experts.

Learn More

We've really only scratched the surface when it comes to SEO for your Shopify store. There's so much more you can do to learn about how SEO can be incredibly valuable to the growth of your business.

Keywords Matter, Keywords Don’t Matter – How To Make Sense of SEO Evolution

Search engine optimization seems to confuse a lot of people. Some small business owners I’ve talked to just frown when I try to explain it to them. Others don’t really even want me to explain it. They just want their pages to rank well.
Unfortunately, all the confusion is probably not going to go away. As the search engines get smarter, there are fewer hard and fast rules to cling to. Techniques that were widely endorsed even a few years ago could now land you in trouble. The whole debate around links is a good example of this. But keywords are an even better example.

Are keywords dead?

There are several articles about keywords being dead on pretty much every website that covers SEO. Most of those articles come to one of these conclusions:

• Keywords aren’t dead. It’s just the way we should use them has evolved
• Keywords are dead. They’ve been replaced by “semantic search” and “user intent“

Both conclusions are right. Keyword best practices have definitely changed. And those best practices have changed because the search engines now understand keywords in a way that’s much more like a human user would understand them.

Keywords are not dead

But just so we’re all clear: Keywords still matter. They aren’t dead. As long as people as still typing keywords, aka “search phrases” into search engines, keywords will still matter.
The question to ask with keywords is not whether they’re dead or not. The question is how to use them now. I will be giving you some very specific examples of how to do that in a moment. But to understand what’s changed with keywords requires a brief journey into search engine theory, namely the concept of “semantic search”.

What’s semantic search?

Semantic search is at the crux of how keyword usage for SEO has changed. Understand it, and pretty much every current best practice for keywords will make sense.
Fortunately, it’s not too hard. And the wordsmiths among you have probably already figured it out. It’s all in the semantics. In other words, the search engines are now attempting to handle keywords the same way humans handle words. The search engines are also actively trying to identify and downplay pages that have been overly manipulated to rank well.
Semantics is “the branch of linguistics and logic concerned with meaning”, according to Google’s own results.
Here’s the definition of semantic search, according to Wikipedia (and Google, too):

Semantic search seeks to improve search accuracy by understanding searcher intent and the contextual meaning of terms as they appear in the searchable dataspace, whether on the Web or within a closed system, to generate more relevant results.

So what we’re talking about here is that the search engines aren’t just looking at the sequence of letters when someone types “Chinese food”. That might have been true ten years ago, and then it might have worked to have “Chinese food” in every subhead on your page and in your title. But now search engines try to decrypt a user’s intention from a search. They can do this several ways, like:

• Checking where the user is geographically and serving up information based on that
• Checking what the user has searched for before, and serving up information based on that
• Checking what the most common user intents are, and offering search results that fit the most common user intents

What’s cool about this is that search engines aren’t just dumb bots streaking through trillions of web pages to find exact matches for “Chinese food”. They’re learning machines. Search engines track and learn from our behavior. That’s why I see different results from my Google searches than you do.

Search is influenced by context

The other big part of semantic search is context. This is hinted at in user intent, but context also includes other related words. Context is why the search engines understand that “rose” and “planting” are related keywords, while “Chinese food” and “stencils” are not.
If you read articles or listen to SEO webinars of experts talking about keywords, they often talk about how we should now think of keywords as if they were concepts or topics. It’s a good way to describe what’s changed. But there’s an even easier: Start thinking of your keywords like a human, not like a search engine.
That’s not the complete story on semantic search (there are entire books about the subject), but it’s the gist of it. For a deeper dive into semantic search and how to understand SEO as a whole, see our ebook, “SEO 101: The Basics and Beyond.” It outlines

• The major recent search engine updates
• How to craft well-optimized content for specific audiences
• Keyword research
• How to optimize each part of your pages
• Best practices for site-wide SEO

Specific advice on how to use keywords now

Now that you’re armed with some background on keyword usage, I’ve got three lists for you: What to do, what to not do, and what to be careful with when you’re working with keywords.

Keyword Dos

• Vary your keywords. The days of insisting that one static term be used throughout a page are over. Toss that idea out. It’s far better to write your pages like you would naturally, without a search engine bot over your shoulder. Specifically, that means using tenses (write, wrote, written, for example) and related terms (like “penned”, “authored”, “composed”).

• Think of your keywords more as topics or concepts. This viewpoint makes you more likely to create content that includes your keywords but isn’t chained to them.

• Place your keywords strategically throughout your page. Don’t overdo it and always keep the best interests of your reader as your primary goal, but adding keywords in a few strategic places can increase your page readability, and increase the likelihood that a searcher will select your page vs a competitive page when they are looking for information. For more information, check out Critical Rules for SEO Success.
• Title. Each page on your site should have a unique title tag. If possible the keyword (core concept of the page) should start in the first 10 characters.

• Meta description. Each page on your site should have a unique meta description. You want the give the reader a quick summary of what they will find on the page, and including the keyword is a good way to do this.
• Alt tags are the tags used to describe images. Their highest duty is to help visitors who can’t see the image to understand what the image is trying to convey.
• H1 – H6 tags. H1 tags are headlines and give the reader a quick understanding of what is on the page. H2–H6 tags are subheaders and give the reader a quick way to skim the page and stop at the section that is relevant to them.

Also add keywords (carefully) to:

• File names
• Directory names
• Blog categories

Keyword Don’ts

• Do not focus on keyword density: It’s over. Stop counting how many times you use your keyword on a page.

• Do not “stuff” or overuse keywords. Here’s an example of keyword stuffing in an alt tag:

<img src=”sampleimage.gif” alt=”CRM software, CRM, CRM software companies, 
best CRM software, CRM services, CRM companies”>

 

A good ALT tag wouldn’t be written at all like that. It would be written to actually help the user. Keep in mind that ALT tag copy also sometimes gets grabbed by social media platforms (like Pinterest) as description copy. And keep your ALT copy short: The recommended maximum length is 65 characters (including spaces).
Here’s good alt text:

<img src=”sampleimage.gif” alt=”Use our CRM software guide to 
decide which solution is best for you.”>

For more information on keyword stuffing and what Google considers irrelevant keywords, see their Quality guidelines article about irrelevant keywords.

• Do not focus on ranking for one single, chosen keyword. There are tens of thousands of searches occurring that include your keyword, or that your page might rank for. (Your page can rank for a keyword that you don’t expect. It depends on the meaning of your content, and the terms the searcher uses.) Just obsessing over that one keyword would actually cost you traffic – and a lot of it. Remember, 16 to 20%25 of search queries have never been searched for before. That’s how many variations of searches are. Don’t just restrict yourself to one static keyword because that’s what popped up in a keyword tool. Remember: Optimize for concepts, not keywords.

• Do not think that a page perfectly optimized for one keyword is a guarantee of good search rankings. There are many other factors influencing rankings.

Be careful with:

• Over-using keywords in hyperlinks. This applies both to inbound links you create, and to links you create within your site.

For example: Marianne Smith is a world-class copywriter at ABC Agency.
In the example above, “copywriter” is the “anchor text”. Anchor text is just the words that are hyperlinked. It’s okay to sprinkle keywords into hyperlinks/anchor text, but don’t overdo it. And you’ll be better off if you vary that anchor text. For our example, we could have:

• Marianne Smith is a world-class writer at ABC Agency.
• Marianne Smith is a world-class wordsmith at ABC Agency.

If this was an author biography at the end of a guest post, the best practice is to skip the keyword altogether and go with the person’s name or company name, like this:

• Marianne Smith is a world-class copywriter at ABC Agency.
• Marianne Smith is a world-class copywriter at ABC Agency.

For more details on how to play safe with inbound links, check Google’s Quality Guidelines page about Link Schemes.
 

App Store Optimization

In this part we will concentrate on mobile acquisition. In any business, one of the ingredients to making larger profits is paying less. In marketing terms, this is eCPA (effect Cost per Acquisition). Remember that the CTAs are slightly different as the first step is to get the user to download the app and then register.

There are three considerations for mobile acquisition –search, paid traffic (media/affiliates), and the app store.

Search Engine Optimization

Let’s start with the easiest – SEO (Search Engine Optimization) or organic traffic from search engines. As with online, someone who has taken the time to search for you or your product is more likely to convert and the relative costs are much lower. The chance of attracting this lucrative user is based on your ranking in the search engine and therefore you need to work on your rank for both desktop and mobile. We have already seen that Google looks favorably on mobile friendly sites (at least for its mobile results). The basis of good ranking is a clean strategy of quality engaging relevant content and building brand authority. Online and mobile play by the same rules.

Paid Traffic

When we deal with paid advertising and affiliates we can also include paid Google campaigns. The first step is deciding which campaigns drive traffic to the website and which to the app store. The best way to get started with media is to bring in a specialist in mobile marketing. This can be done in-house or outsourced to a specializing agency. Campaign management is very different from online in many respects. For example, there are unique channels like in-app video advertisements which point directly to the app stores. There are also specialist sites and affiliates. Like all marketing, it comes down to analysis and ongoing optimization. If you apply an 80/20 rule, then 80% should go to campaigns you are confident with and 20% allocated for finding new channels or creatives.

App Store Optimization

Particular to mobile is App Store Optimization (ASO). ASO shares many traits with SEO with additional considerations. First piece of knowledge required is that the Play store has better search facilities than Apple’s App Store. Correct keyword tagging is essential. The second piece of knowledge is that a vast majority of app discovery happens with the app stores; according to a Forrester report 63% of apps are discovered by app store searches. ASO is about making your product discoverable via keywords, targeting similar products and ranking. Other than the title you give the product and keywords, the other main factors are number of downloads and ratings and reviews. This is why your apps keep asking for a rating.

For successful marketing you will need to blend your strategy. Paid advertising brings the quickest results but at a high cost with lower conversion. SEO and ASO take more time but bring better quality and lower costs.

Why Local SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is Beneficial

Local SEO is a specific sub-area of SEO. It has become an increasingly important factor of a good online marketing strategy. Local SEO adds a geographical element to searches. Businesses can now optimize to appear in location-specific web searches. The location can be a specific city, state, or even neighborhood.

Local SEO and Best PracticesThe last update of the Google search algorithm (termed Pigeon) makes establishing a local search presence even more important for business. Having a good local presence means adding the dimension of place to your overall marketing strategy.
· Create a local business listing on Google+ Local, Yelp, Bing Places, Internet Yellow Pages, and Yahoo! Local.
· Use consistent NAP (Name, Address, and Phone Number) across pages.
· Localize your schema markup
· Give your customers the opportunity to review your business online

Benefits of Local SEO
Optimizing your local search presence can have enormous benefits for your business. It will boost sales, increase your visibility (both online and offline) and help you connect with customers. Latest Google statistics tell us that about 20% of search queries are related to location.

Attract and connect with a large numbers of customers
People exceedingly rely on search engines such as Google, Bing, Yahoo!, etc. when looking for information about local businesses. Google has been including geographic area by default in search results since 2009. If your business caters to customers in a limited geographic area, then local SEO is a must-have part of your online marketing strategy.

Reaching mobile users
An increasing number of people are using their smartphone to access the web. Information released by Google shows that mobile search queries have surpassed desktop searches. This fact alone stands out as a reason to focus on building local SEO. Google also includes location and proximity information in their AdWords algorithm when search queries come from mobile users.

Increased local visibility and easier KPI tracking
Local SEO will enable you to have a more focused marketing campaign. Narrowing down the target market will help you cater more effectively and measure responses more accurately.
Build better customer connections and improve your reputation
Online reviews and ratings will help understand your business and your customers’ needs. Good ratings will boost your online and local reputation. You can offer special online promotions or target store visitors with spur of the moment sales, you will also be able to compare customer’s in-store habits and online preferences.

The Optimized Publisher: Structured Data Markup

In the old standard “Over the River and Through the Woods,” a trip to Grandma’s house exposes our noses and toes to the elements over an arduous journey by sleigh. Wouldn’t it be great if there were a shortcut to Grandma’s that allowed us to get there faster without exposing us to frostbite?
In 2009, Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and Yandex introduced schema.org, a shortcut for search engine spiders on their way to indexing your website, to help them better understand the location and attributes of the content on your site. This shortcut relies on “structured data markup language” and can be found in the HTML code of a website to explain the products and content to search engines. Quite an important shortcut indeed!

As an SEO factor, “structured data” is probably more on the advanced side. But there are specific items for the publishing industry that make this an important factor to consider implementing.
Structured data markup is still fairly new, and many of the independent publishers that we reviewed have not integrated it into their code (only two of our participants are currently using it). That is the reason for such low scores for this SEO Factor (an aggregate score of 1.4, or an “F” grade). Fortunately, there are some great tutorials to help you add this shortcut to your site and book catalogs.

How the Structured Data Markup Shortcut Works
When schema.org was created, Google and the other search engines defined a “vocabulary” that would apply to information found within a website during indexing. This vocabulary was integrated into search engine algorithms to help them better understand the information on the page, enabling them to correctly categorize the content on the page in their indexes. For example, one of the schema.org items is “creative work,” such as a book or a song.

An item matching the vocabulary can be easily identified by a search engine and, through the use of structured data markup language in the website code can provide further information in the results. Some information can even be displayed in detail on the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs), improving your individual results and your click through rate (CTR) for your website pages. How does it do this?

By identifying a book as a creative work or book in the structured data markup, you now have access to additional signifiers that help further define the book and its attributes in the search engine index. Per schema.org, a search engine can find book details such as author, title, number of pages, genre and much more as long as the information is “marked up” and marked up correctly. This helps search engines identify your books as books and potentially gives users some extra information in their search results.
Structured Data Markup Examples from Our Participants
As I stated above, only two participants in our analysis of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for book publishers are currently using structured data markup (as of the date of our analysis). I hope these examples from Xist Publishing and The Doomsday Kids will show that providing a shortcut for search engines is worth the investment. You will probably need to get an SEO expert and/or a knowledgeable developer to implement structured data, but it will be well worth it.
The Doomsday Kids website uses the creative works schema for the books in its catalog and integrates the attributes for “book” into its HTML code. For the title Nester’s Mistake, the structured data markup includes title, author, book formats, ISBN numbers, publication date and additional information. We’re going to get a little technical here and look at the actual code for the page. I’ve bolded the attributes that are defining the book on this page for the search engines.

Google has provided a tool that will let you test the structured data on your page, which can be found here.

While it’s great that Doomsday Kids has taken the time to implement structured data on its book page, when we run the page through Google’s tool, it comes back with five errors that it found in the structure of the code. Looking at the code, however, there are actually more than five. So Kudos to Doomsday Kids for implementing structured data, but its developers need to go back and fix the code.
The page is shown in the search results as:

For this title, the structured data markup identifies the item as a book, letting the search engine know to classify the item as such and not another sort of creative work or product. It also tells the search engine the attributes of this book (author, title, etc.). However, one thing that is missing is the presentation of the information in “rich snippets.”
If you look at another SERP listing for the book, you will see the following search result:

Rich snippets present specific attributes of your books within a search result. In this case, you can see the added review stars, rating and the number of votes for the review—attributes that might help a user interested in this book make a decision about clicking on the link and then purchasing it. Google currently supports rich snippets product information and reviews (among other areas), which can contribute greatly to CTR for a website. A 2011 report shows that businesses that present structured data markup in rich snippets saw a 30-percent increase in revenue.

Xist Publishing features the book Mi Gato Es Gordo/My Cat Is Fat in the fiction picture books section of its website. To make this book page easier for search engines to read and understand, Xist is using structured data markup in the HTML code. But instead of using creative work, Xist identifies the book as a “product,” which comes with its own set of possible attributes, including:

This book appears in the search results in the following format:

As you can see from the example of the HTML code and its SERP listing, Xist is using the structured data markup to signal a shortcut for the search engine. It also displays some rich snippets: the price and availability are listed in the result description. However, by identifying the schema for products instead of creative works, Xist is missing out on a lot of attributes that they could include in its code that may then be featured in the search result: author, genre and book ratings, for example.

The Knowledge Graph
Another possible benefit from using schema.org and the corresponding structured data markup is something called a “knowledge graph.” Using data gleaned from indexing and user experience, Google and other search engines can take that information and present it as a separate section within the search results (usually found on the right-hand side of the page). This additional “search result” is perfect for independent book publishers whose potential customers are searching by author or subject name.

For example, searching for Mark Twain brings up a lot of information about the author: images, lifespan, a short bio and a list of books written by/about him. This includes Letters from Hawaii, a book by one of our evaluation participants, University of Hawaii Publishing. Clicking on the links provided in the knowledge graph could bring potential customers one step closer to purchase.
So how can a publisher take advantage of the knowledge graph? Follow structured data markup and schema.org integration on your website so that search engines know your book catalog and roster of authors .

Note: It should be mentioned that not all authors show up in the knowledge graph. A subject/author must be a known entity in order to appear.

Schema.org: Shortcuts for the Right Reasons
Search engines are not able to make the same decisions as people and/or come to the same conclusion or solution. Using schema.org and the corresponding structured data markup gives search engines the best directions available to locate information on your site and present it to potential customers. Without these shortcuts, books can be categorized incorrectly, possibly not even as books at all, with the information essential for purchase relegated to the bottom or back pages of SERPs (exactly where you don’t want your books to get lost).

Google has some great tools for integrating structured data markup into your website code, as do the other search engines. However, some of these changes to books in your catalog may be complex and will probably require the assistance of an SEO expert and your developers. Still, based on the benefits of structured data markup language, it is a worthwhile investment that helps search engines find your content more easily.

Our next post takes possible shortcuts to the extreme. I’m talking about page load speed next and the importance of giving search engines a quick route to your site pages. Please join me on our next road trip to SEO success.
Article Source : digitalbookworld

Have you implemented any structured data on your site? If so, let me know in the comments below.