My Sharing with Developer Circle Penang.. How Structured Data Can Boost Your SEO (Website Rankings)?

Thanks to the invitation by Developer Circle Penang community, especially Mr. Gooi Liang Zheng (the Penang Lead of Facebook Developer Circle), I had the opportunity to share my SEO knowledge to fellow members. The SEO & Marketing Meetup took place at aCAT Penang, Georgetown.

The two speakers of the event were Calvin Lee and myself. As the first speaker, I was delighted to share on Structured Data about search engine optimization (SEO). Calvyn Lee took the stage later and shared his insight on “The Importance of Sales Funnel”.

Here is a summary of my sharing: How to Boost Your SEO (website rankings) using Structured Data

1. What is Structured Data?
2. How can structured data improve my SEO?
3. How to implement it to my website?
4. Tips & Suggestions
5. Q & A

The official definition of ‘structured data’ is as follows, according to Google Search developer documentation:

Standardized format for providing information about a page and classifying the page content for search engines to understand.

Source: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/guides/intro-structured-data

Next, I moved on to show the audience various popular examples of structured data, such as products, breadcrumbs, events, FAQ, How-to and Recipe.

In fact, as I write, the total number of types of SEO has reached almost 30. To view the full list, click here: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/data-types/article

Where Google will keep updating and adding more types, requirements and official guidelines.

How can structured data improve SEO?

Here is a quick summary:

1. Make it easier for Google to understand what your pages are and what your website is about. It will improve your search engine visibility.
2. The extra rich content on your website — graph, featured snippet and voice searches — will increase your click-through rate (CTR).
3. Add in new features as many websites are still not utilizing structured data. As always, users are attracted to the new things they see on Google search results.

Next, I explained the methods and tools to implement structured data.

This includes hardcoded, schema.org, Google Structured Data Testing Tool, Rich Result Test, Google Search Console, Schema Markup Generator (JSON-LD), codelabs.developer.google.com, Yoast SEO WordPress Plugin and Google Tag Manager.

Since the crowd is made of beginners and not coder members, I recommended using plugins as the starting point to install structured data on the website. It’s fast and easy to manage compared to the rest of the methods. 

Lastly, it was a pleasure to share my experience, including the mistakes I made in structured data injection.

Key Takeaways 

1. The best practice is to read and follow all guidelines, solve all the errors/warning issues and don’t ever try to ‘cheat’ Google.
2. The consequences will be manual actions or penalty — your website might experience a drop in ranking or even disappear from Google.
3. Here is my presentation deck:
   
   How to Boost Your SEO using Structured Data from Martin Tang

Although it’s just a short and simple sharing session, I loved the environment where everyone could network, contribute their experience and help each other. 

See you in the next sharing! 

BONUS: Here is a full video of my presentation, feel free to watch and learn!