My presentation from SMX Milan 2014 covering the history of structured data, usage statistics, schema.org implementation guidelines as well as tools.

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SEMANTIC SEARCH…
… WANTS STRUCTURED DATA!
Bastian Grimm, VP Organic Search, Peak Ace AG | @basgr

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Presentation Download:
http://pa.ag/smxm-schema

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The web is evolving…
… and so is it‘s mark-up!
HTML 2.0 HTML 4.0 XHTML 1.0 HTML 5
Sometime in between,
people started caring
about writing under-standable
code…

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#1 You Provide
Meaning
Semantic mark-up is meant to describe content!

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#2 You Increase
Maintainability
Do content in HTML; use CSS & JS for layout!

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#3 Semantic Mark-Up
is Quality
Browsers don’t really care, others systems do!

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It‘s all about machine-readable data!
According to Tim Berners-Lee (in 2001 already):
“The Semantic Web
provides a common
framework that
allows data to be
shared and reused
across application,
enterprise, and community
boundaries”
http://www.w3.org/2013/data/

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Because: „Regular“ HTML has limits!
Took Google long enough to figure that one out…!

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06/2011: Introducing schema.org
Announced by Google, Bing & Yahoo! Now: Yandex as well.

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04/2010: Global Roll-out of Rich Snippets
Loooong testing period BEVOR rolling out schema.org

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Why should I care about those?
What’s all the fuss, why not let Google handle it?

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CTR is influenced by more than position!
 Site-Links for a regular result
 Universal Results from Google News
 Video Snippet (image-only)
 Image Search Results
 Movie / TV Mark-Up
 Ratings
 Publication Date
 Breadcrumbs
 etc.

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SERP CTR studies are mostly over…
Rich Snippets, Personalization, Geo-Targeting & more!
http://moz.com/blog/google-organic-click-through-rates-in-2014

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SERP CTR…
…almost only depends on how GREAT your
snippet is & if you can make it stand out!

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Microdata on the rise?
Well… yes and no: Total amount of sites using is it still small!
http://trends.builtwith.com/docinfo/Microdata

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Compared to sites using HTML5:
Schema-growth / adoption rate is significantly smaller!
http://trends.builtwith.com/docinfo/HTML5-DocType

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Very few make use of schema.org!
Taken from Searchmetrics “HTML Microdata and RDF” Study
In the US, as few as 0.3% of
all domains are using
schema.org in their mark-up
But: Only 34% of all key-words
do not return any
schema.org (-like) snippet
Remember: Amazon.com &
Wikipedia don‘t use schema!
http://www.searchmetrics.com/en/knowledge-base/schema/

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Most Popular Markups: Movies & Offers
Taken from Searchmetrics “HTML Microdata and RDF” Study

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Looks like lot‘s of opportunities…!

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Does it help you with rankings?
In Short: It does not… but maybe a bit!?
“Google doesn’t use
markup for ranking
purposes at this time - but
rich snippets can make your web
pages appear more prominently
in search results, so you may
see an increase in
traffic.”
http://pa.ag/1tuhYZO

21. Introducing the Google Knowledge Graph
Surprise: We want “connect” and “understand” entities…!
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Back to my previous example:
Wikipedia + schema.org based Items to trigger KG-boxes

23. This is straight forward: “Cast” as a trigger
BTW: Did you know people don’t look at the carrousel?
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Mediative’s 2014 Study: http://pages.mediative.com/SERP-research

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Simple questions being answered…
Schema.org: Thing > Place > AdministrativeArea > Country

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Indirect triggers working to some extend:
City “Rome” connected to “Italy” w/ property “capital=true”…

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Google is moving forward…
Mainly to pick up on those “non-obvious” connections:
“It’s why we’ve been working on an
intelligent model that understands real-world
entities and their relationships to
one another: things, not strings.”

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This is where it get’s really interesting:
Google starting to answer “real world” questions…

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This is where it get’s really interesting:
And not only based on Wikipedia… other sources as well!

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Organic Search Results, anyone?

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Schema.org-based Vertical Search!
https://www.google.it/#q=paint.net&hl=en&tbm=app

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Implementing Schema.org is easy!
It’s just kind of “extended” HTML code to connect things
Rating  has value  9.4
Rating  has ratings  325
<form itemprop="aggregateRating" itemscope
itemtype="http://schema.org/AggregateRating">
<div class="score" style="background-color:#69cb02"
itemprop="ratingValue">9.4</div>
<span style="display:none;">out of
<span itemprop="bestRating">10</span>
<strong>User Rating</strong>
<div class="votes"><span itemprop="ratingCount">325</span>
votes</div>
</form>

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Schema.org has all the code!
Changes almost daily, monitor it? - changedetection.com

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Structured Data Testing Tool
Use HTML-Tab for developer testing (c/p from staging)
http://www.google.de/webmasters/tools/richsnippets

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Structured Data in Webmaster Tools
Gives you an idea which data Google sees on your domain

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Google Data Highlighter in GWT
Caution: This is only visible to Google, not to others!

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SCHEMA CREATION TOOLS
TO SPEED UP YOUR IMPLEMENTATION PROCESS

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The microDATAgenerator
www.microdatagenerator.com

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Raven Schema Creator
www.schema-creator.org

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Schema Creator for WordPress
wordpress.org/plugins/schema-creator

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All In One Schema.org for WordPress
wordpress.org/plugins/all-in-one-schemaorg-rich-snippets/

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If you’re on an CMS such as Drupal…
drupal.org/project/schemaorg

42. THERE IS A LOT OF CHANGES…
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TRY TO STAY ON TRACK!

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Introducing Schema.org Actions
…it’s no just about static entities, it’s about Actions on those!
Announcing Schema.org Actions: http://pa.ag/1wrLH8c

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Be innovative, play around…
But most importantly: Keep it real!
Report Rich Snippet Spam: http://pa.ag/1oad1Gu

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Your turn! Questions?
 bg@peakace.de
 twitter.com/peakaceag
 facebook.com/peakaceag
 www.peakace.de
http://pa.ag/smxm-schema