Structured Data

Structured data is a short note you add to a page so search engines can read it, and the visitor never sees it. It sits in the page code and states plain facts in a fixed form, saying this is a product, this is its price, it is in stock. That agreed form is called Schema, which is why Google, Bing and the rest read the same one.

Ordinary writing on a page is guesswork for a machine. A person reads that a shop is open until nine and understands at once, while a search engine only sees letters. Structured data ends the guessing, because it names each fact instead of hiding it inside a sentence.

The reward shows up in the way your result looks. A shop can earn a price and a stock line under its title, and a restaurant can show its opening hours. A page of common questions can show the questions themselves and take more room on screen, and stars can appear beside a product. These extras are called rich results, and they are often why one listing gets the click while the one above it does not.

One rule matters more than the others, and it is that the markup must match what the visitor actually sees. If the code claims four and a half stars while the page shows no reviews, Google can drop every rich result for the whole site, not just that page. The same goes for a price in the code that no longer matches the price on show.

Prices are where shops slip. Someone changes the price at the till, but the note in the page code was typed by hand a year ago and nobody goes back. Storek builds that note from the same record the shop already edits, so the two cannot drift apart, and Linkysoft generates the markup from live data in every web application it builds for exactly that reason.

Test it before you trust it. You paste the address into Google's free rich results test and it tells you what it read and what it refused. Know the limit too, because correct markup does not move you up the page on its own. It changes how your result looks, not where it sits, so anyone promising a ranking jump from Schema alone is selling you something. Linkysoft treats it as free space in the search result, and free space is worth taking.