There are different methods you can use to improve behavioral factors and drive traffic to your website. You may have already tried most of them, but you still haven’t achieved the desired result. If it is the case of yours, then pay attention to what competitors’ snippets look like in search results. Does your website preview differ from them? If not, it’s time to think about introducing micro-markup on the site pages (at least one key selling anchor). Keep reading this post to know what micro-markup is and how to implement it.
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What Is Micro-Markup?
Micro-markup is the markup on the site and pages that helps to convey more information about the page to search robots and site visitors by introducing additional tags and attributes into the HTML code. Thanks to micro-markup, the page looks more attractive in search results, easy to distinguish, and attracts more users to visit it. Therefore, semantic markup contributes to the effective SEO-promotion of the site, and your SEO checklist should cover it.
Among the main advantages of micro-markup are the following:
- Attractive snippet — in search results, it will be favorably distinguished from competitors;
- Extra method for promotion — it will determine how microdata is displayed in search results;
- Determining the information on the page that the search engines need to process;
- The search engine determines the type and content of the page: contacts, product description, recipe, event, and others.
As a rule, the site’s micro-markup consists of tags and attributes with specific content. Some of them are read by search robots; others are visible to users only. Using micro-markup, you can insert into a snippet:
- Review;
- Picture;
- Photo;
- Rating;
- Product availability;
- Address;
- Bread crumbs;
- Time and date;
- Product description;
- Recipe, etc.
Using micro-markup is beneficial for any online resource; it allows you to mark up information about any key item. In this case, you independently choose the data that will be displayed in the search results and select the appropriate mark-up type.
What Are the Functions of Microdata?
There are many things that microdata can do for your online business. First of all, in search results, it improves the appearance of the site, makes snippets more attractive, useful, informative, and more interesting for the Internet user. Besides that, links to social networks are also transformed, become understandable, and more attractive to click.
Although the markup does not directly affect the website’s rendering or conversion, it has significant benefits:
- It affects the snippet and makes it more target audience-specific, which, in turn, provides more useful information and is more attractive to users. This pushes them to go to the site from the SERP;
- The search algorithms of Google love order and treat simple and high-quality resources better. The micro-markup of the site is another thing that refers to the order and is so loved by search engines;
- With the help of semantic markup, a site matrix is created. According to it, the search engine algorithm reads information. The site becomes more understandable for the system, which indirectly affects the search results;
- From a user point of view, a correct snippet also helps a person understand what the page is about.
It is also worth noting that if the site has incorrect markup, this will not in any way affect the search engine results. But from a user point of view, good micro-markup is of great benefit. With a cool snippet, CTR (click-through rate) can grow by 2-3%. And this is a good increase in page visitors and potential profit for the business.
Effective Micro-Markup for Twitter
The importance of social networks in business online promotion keeps growing every day, and Twitter occupies one of the leading roles as the main channel bringing the target audience to a site being promoted. To increase conversion and improve the appearance of website content that is published on social networks, you need to install special meta tags. Each popular social network has different meta tags. Since the introduction of markup, various vocabularies and syntaxes have been implemented. Let’s consider the most popular Twitter meta tags that you can use for your project:
- Summery Card — Standard view, including a title, description, icon, and a Twitter link;
- Summary Card with large images — the same as the previous one but only with large images used in a directory;
- Photo Card — a card that contains only an image;
- Gallery Card — a collection of images;
- App Card — the description of the mobile application with a download link;
- Player Card — a piece of content that supports video/audio;
- Product Card — a piece of content that is optimized for product information.
Some other attributes that you can use for Twitter are:
- Twitter:Card;
- Twitter:Site;
- Twitter:Title — less than 70 symbols;
- Twitter:Description — less than 200 symbols;
- Twitter:Creator;
- Twitter:Image — an absolute link to the image.
After you’ve made your changes to your site template, we highly recommend that you check if twitter understands your markup correctly. There is a special tool for this on the official site — https://cards-dev.twitter.com/validator. You can also check full documentation on the design of other types of cards on https://dev.twitter.com/cards/overview. By running a quick check, you make sure that the microdata is properly displayed and covers the content you need.
Summing up
The micro-markup of the site is used to correctly index pages and determine the content on these pages. Also, the syntactic markup creates an extended snippet with useful information for site visitors. Most often, bread crumbs, prices, ratings, pictures are introduced using microdata. This makes snippets appear more attractive in search results. So having it in place significantly boosts the promotion potential of your online resource regardless of its business niche and target audience. With this in mind, it is no wonder that micro-markup is a part of any SEO website audit.
