How To Supercharge Experience With Various Rich Content And Media Types. Tips and tricks for marketing and business; Learn more about all the content type possibilities.
Writing your own content may seem like something better left to experts. However, you can achieve massive results using online resources, modern applications and artificial intelligence. Consider for a moment that most of the content used to train artificial intelligence models is from published content, books, websites or even more specific domain content. Combing these tools with your domain knowledge can easily create valuable content that turns spare knowledge into massive profit.
In this section, we cover the important aspects for creating great content and discuss techniques businesses can use within their website build solution. If you prefer a in depth technical guide of all things Google search, may I refer you to the Google Search Documentation.
1 - Getting Started: web content types
Learn why investing in website content is a good approach. Get started understanding the options and how to focus your investment to maximise results.
What is a web document?
Typically web pages are displayed in a web browser and rendered via HTML, its very easy to miss or forget about the numerous other features that websites, browsers, and applications provide. In this section we discuss those content types you can use on your website. Web browsers over recent years have become capable operating systems (the market share of Chromebook by Google continues to rise) and with trillions of pounds support from investments in compatible cloud software there is little expectation that this will falter. On-top of that, website don’t just show a page, but instead can be complete APIs (application programmable interfaces) which can be used to do almost anything. From display a web page to users, to moving a space rover on Mars.
What should my investment in content focus on?
Picking the best features to support for your particular business and audience is a great way to foster valuable engagement. A very common one may be to create an authoritative source of information about a subject. In many cases this is a business, service, guide or documentation.
Why support RSS for websites in 2024?
With subscriptions (RSS) to website sections users get access to tailored content from their favorite websites in a data feed. The typical user may only have 100 applications installed on their phone, and many get very little usage. Competition for user screen time is high and for good reason. Time is important. When your site may provide value to users, it only occurs if they happen on your page to receive it. Getting the user to directly search to receive any value from your content is not feasible because you are not the only one they need to check. That’s where data feeds have taken dominance, pushing relevant information in aggregate to the user.
What is RSS?
RSS (RDF Site Summary or Really Simple Syndication)[2] is a web feed[3] that allows users and applications to access updates to websites in a standardized, computer-readable format. Subscribing to RSS feeds can allow a user to keep track of many different websites in a single news aggregator, which constantly monitor sites for new content, removing the need for the user to manually check them. News aggregators (or “RSS readers”) can be built into a browser, installed on a desktop computer, or installed on a mobile device.
Webpages can be shared and many pieces of content are created to spread. Sharing content isn't just about people sharing it with others, being able to store and retrieve any previously accessed information is also vial. Often customers react on impulse, don't react immediately or don't know they will need your product. Hyperlinks act as a great way to quickly store documents and are a great way to spread content via sharing on other platforms. They are also build in to most features and platforms, allowing users a standard approach for acessing such information.
Shareable content isn't just about creating content that the user will save, it's allowing third party applets to to access information and serve rich results when users are searching for your product indirectly.
Many browsers now have the ability to generate shareable links or qr codes directly from their share interface. Producing content to leverage these mechanics can help promote and let people discover your product. Moreover, social media runs on the sharing of links.
By controling your website you can produce content how you like and never be affected by platforms going in a direction you don't like. This benefits in many aspects of user experience and allows you to tailor the user interface around your particular content. By using a website as your platform to engage your users you can provide rich tools that offer real value to them. Creating content around your plan and website is a great way to give users the most from your website. Keep reading to learn more.
Creating content for marketing is one of the primary focuses of websites, giving users the option to browse your products, find what they need, then refer back to them and share the information.
When producing content for your website you can tailor it to provide insights from within your domain. Doing this correctly will enable both your business and your customer to benefit by providing solutions to problems they have. Often can be accomplished by interacting with your customers or creating blog posts.
Using your website as a single source of truth, you may make posts to all the social media platforms to improve workflow efficiency. While always linking back to your primary platform. Many tools work directly with your websites features (RSS). And many new actions are enabled every day.
dlvrit.com - Send your content to various platforms.
Blog submission sites and feed aggregators.
AI services like chatgpt plugins
Automate with low code and low code templates on web standards - ifttt.com.
Show your appointments or calendar. And take appointment requests
Take form submissions for any data you need
Link to other websites or related info
Create user authenticated pages or authorise users based on some category
2 - Images: a complete guide
Review of how images can supercharge the overall experience of you web pages. Learn about all the required assets of web pages and how to best create utilise your resources when preparing them.
How images are supercharged on the web
Images are first-class citizens of every website.
Images are one of the main types of elements builtin into web browsers. There are only a few ways to display web pages. You can use the HTML standard to create a canvas, which allows the developer complete control over all the pixels of the entire window. Another method is to use the traditional HTML standard to create your web pages. The HTML standard offers elements that mark up a website in a declarative manner. Additionally, HTML offers many common elements that have builtin interfaces across all browsers. That means it’s often best to use the HTML standard to build web pages, as re-creating builtin elements with bespoke replacements is practically impossible.
This means that images can be treated as first class citizens of the web browser, like hyperlinks, text, or the web page itself.
How do images offer something exciting and visual to see?
Images are important to the user. We abandoned using text interfaces in the early 1990s. Humans often respond to visual inputs, and this makes images a vital part of marketing. When someone looks at your pages, within one second, they are impressed. Images don’t need to be impressive to look professional; you can create a very nice-looking web page using only simple imagery.
Images are more than decorations. Along with some people preferring to learn visually, images can convey meaning that is much more impactful than a long description.
How do I add images to my site?
When adding an image to your site, each build solution has its own way. It is best to stick to the solution facilities when adding your images. However, when the images are displayed on the page, it is normal to use a simple <img (HTMLImageElement). This means that no matter the method, what the user sees on the page is often the same (if you don’t take into account compression).
How do the search engines see my images?
When search engines are crawling a website, they will often follow all the links they can find on the website. They often even ignore instructions to not follow the link. This is because the no follow option of HTMLImageElement(s) is not indented to stop a crawler from discovering them. While a crawler may discover links that are not intended to be on the website, that does not mean it will index them in their search results. There are many facilities available to instruct Google that a given link is intended to be consumed as part of the main body of a website. Some of the tools are as follows: Structured Content, Meta Information, Sitemap, and Image Sitemap.
An important one for images is the image sitemap. This is a file that describes all of the images within a section of a website. The typical format to serve a file in is xml. Each build solution has its own method of producing the XML file. However, it’s often just a simple list of images with some meta data describing them. Another important method is structured content. This, too, can add images to the search engine results. In recent years, there has been a push to provide more information about each image, and give search engines more information about the context of any image. One of the main bits of information is the copyright license. That is why structured data has become the go-to for getting your images into search results.
Are image listings required?
Many of the images displayed on the web are not the primary images. There are many variants of the image, one for each device. Sometimes there are different size images for better connections, and many other options are available. This means that if a search engine collects all the images, it will have many different versions of the same image. On top of that, lots of the images on the web use hashes as a means to bust cache. This means the number of variants of a single image will explode. Showing all of those to the user would be a bad experience. That is where structured content has become popular. It gives you a method to link all the associated images and data for any search engines while allowing you to keep the technical benefits of many different images.
The definitive web page image checklist
Auto-magic Image Generation
Leverage the power of cutting-edge generative AI software to effortlessly and expeditiously craft impeccable images that perfectly complement your digital assets. By harnessing the capabilities of AI technology, you can efficiently produce stunning visuals that align with your brand’s unique vision and resonate with your target audience. This innovative approach not only saves time and resources, but also ensures that your digital content stands out in today’s competitive landscape.
One complicated part of making website comes in the form of there being no right answer. When designing an asset, the end results can look completly different. The only way to approach this problem is to add what you can view and test. This allows you to tailor the content for the domain context and the applications you are expecting them to be viewed on.
When consuming a text only article it can be hard to stay engaged. By simply providing topical images it will help to anchor readers into a subject. And to split the content into logical sections. Images also provide a snapshot of a subject that can have both direct and indirect value. So images are worth adding throught your website, wherever they provide something to the reader.
Each page is better with some of the following assets:
Featured cover image
Structured content image set
Open graph image (or video)
Additional assets can also offer visual flair:
Images
360 Images
Timelapse
Infographics
Diagrams
Before/After
Coupons
Leaflets
Promotional material
Image creation software
A free open source desktop image editor is needed: GIMP
Photoshop in the creative suite - expensive industry standard subscription based software, embroiled in legal controversy. That might be slightly too harsh, idc.
Affinity - The photo editing software you’ve been dreaming of
Abobe Illustrator - With powerful new features in Illustrator, you can create graphics that match your style, explore dozens of options and finish designs faster.
3 - Text: website cornerstone
Maximize Your Website’s Potential with Engaging Text Content. Learn how to create impactful text that resonates with your audience. Harness the power of AI and domain knowledge to generate content that drives traffic, boosts brand identity, and capitalizes on trending topics.
Learn about web text properties
How do you create great text content for your website?
Writing your own content may seem like something better left to experts. However, you can achieve a great experience with a little help, online resources, modern applications, and artificial intelligence. Consider for a moment that most of the content used to train artificial intelligence models is from published content, books, websites, or even more specific domain content. Combining these tools with your domain knowledge can easily produce content that turns spare time into massive profit.
Why produce text content for your website?
Brand and Identity
Capturing your own language requirements, benefits, advantages, writing style, communication style, etc. can be hard to implement and even harder to communicate with a web developer within your budget. The rapid and agile nature of the market can significantly reduce its effectiveness.
Trending topics
Take, for example, the rapid nature of domain vocabulary; it changes very quickly nowadays in the age of Facebook and Instagram. Ensuring you capitalise on it instead of suffering can be more than advantageous. Allowing AI to train on your content will ensure that it will be repeated. By leveraging domain vocabulary, one may still funnel engagement from any propagation of their content. After all, telling someone about a new way to google (check out DuckDuckGo by the way) gives engagement to Google. While it may not be beneficial for search engine rankings to create new words entirely or invent something, creating new compound wording allows you to leverage both domain vocabulary and search engine optimisation.
An example may be a food shop. They noticed many of their customers were buying similar groups of items. It’s noted that these customers may be single (not married), so they created a lonely week care package. This comes with many items, including one onion, four loads worth of salad, and some tins of tuna. Finally, I no longer eat out-of-date salad and waste an onion.
No results where found for "lonely week care package".
Suggestions:
Make sure all words are spelled correctly.
Try different keywords.
Try more general keywords.
Try fewer keywords.
It may seem daunting to get someone searching for a new term, but all it takes is an existing customer sharing that they bought your product with a friend. Without the specific compound words, how do you search for a similar product?
As the legal area surrounding web scrapping and content theft is still a very legal grey area, embracing the idea may be the best approach. Now when ChatGPT regurgitates your lonely week care package out of the context of your web page, there is still a chance you may foster some engagement. A google for this term should produce your web page with a high ranking. Google and many other search engines can do a rather good job of attributing your page as the original creator of the text content. After all, your web page may be the first time that particular textural artefact was seen.
Powerful web communication
To be effective, your content needs to provide great information in all accessibility formats, inform search engines of valuable business information, and synchronise data across your providers, all automatically.
Taking advantage of all the features of a user’s browser and all the accessibility benefits is a great way to produce content that is much more enriched than the printed page. Many people can’t read text; they need braille or audio. Web pages can do many things, from interactive content, document display, audio reading, transforming to braille, translating to multiple languages, custom colour schemes, printing, and downloading for offline consumption. Meeting these standards in a non-digital manner must be cumbersome.
Remember, it is estimated that over 30% of users surfing the web do so with some disability. To me, that seems low; I don’t always have my glasses.
By tailoring your own content, you can not only take advantage of an agile methodology but also improve people’s ways of finding information. Has Google benefited from the term “Google it”? I use DuckDuckGo, but it’s still a Google search. It may not seem relevant, but a search for “premium website builder” yields millions of results; however, a search for a particular brand of website builder, “decap cms website builder” yields way fewer results. I know, duh, right? Can this apply to your business? Can your users benefit from more particular terminology?
Broad exposure
Not everyone searches for your content the same way you do, an industry professional. By having web pages targeting those terms that aren’t in your own primary terminology, you ensure traffic on those terms is directed to your website and notify search engines of your website’s relevance to those keywords.
Giving enough information
After reading your website or a document, would a user go away knowing all the relevant information pertaining to your services, or at the very least the majority of the key information? Can they refer back to it? Share it with someone without calling them?
Google and the like know this too, and they punish websites that they infer are of low value.
By writing custom content that’s engaging for users, search engines can better infer your value as a result. This is done by many metrics, and it’s altered seasonally. A good standard to go for is adding many pages of content. Even your boring customer safety document has value to Google. Your customers, too.
Others can be worse. Take DuckDuckGo, for example; they use a less data-intrusive model, which heavily favours back-linking.
How to write great text content?
Writing enough content
It is important for SEO to ensure that web pages have enough words because search engines use the content of a page to determine its relevance and quality. Pages with very little content may be seen as low-quality or thin content by search engines, which can negatively impact the site’s SEO performance.
Having enough words on a page allows search engines to better understand the topic and purpose of the page and match them with relevant search queries. This can result in higher search engine rankings, increased traffic, and improved visibility for the site.
However, it is not just the quantity of words that matters, but also the quality of the content. Pages with high-quality, relevant, and well-written content are more likely to perform well in search engine results. Webmasters should aim to create pages with enough words to provide value to users and to effectively communicate the topic and purpose of the page.
Article structure
When targeting a keyword, for example, “Bonsai trowel", it is good practice to include it in multiple locations on its corresponding page.
In your page title.
In the first block of text on your page
In the page description
It’s also good practice, for the same reasons, to include your keywords in your image file names.
Correct word size and word wrapping
Your template can enable many ways of handling word wrapping, so if you don’t like something or want another behaviour, this is normally possible. Sometimes in the real world, you have words that are longer than the screen width of the device that is viewing them. In these cases, it can cause the layout to shift. Keep in mind that when adding something like a URL, it will be displayed as a single word since it has zero whitespace (space) characters.
It is often good to provide a text description, which can be rendered with the document word wrapping settings. Various website interfaces have methods of adding text to links. In markdown, wrap the text in square brackets, followed by the URL in curly brackets.
Agile approach
Using an agile approach with your website content is more appropriate. Moreover, the rapid nature of search engine changes makes any planning difficult. Coupled with your own customers having varied and changing needs, an agile approach fits great. This Wikipedia document here - view agile software development, is a little heavy reading but makes a great starting point. Give the agile methodology a Google.
How do search engines see text content?
Since any image processing produces text that may not be correct. The words and phrases you explicitly provide with the text on your website are still important.
Each textual artefact has an implicit relationship with other artefacts within its section.
Analytics and search data is crucial data for your business, after publishing some document on a website it is advisable to monitor your website property often. Learn more with our guide to analytics.
What are some good applications for working with text
Unlock the potential of explicit metadata to communicate vital details to external systems. Explore the significance of meta information in improving your website’s performance and user experience.
What is meta info?
Meta information is a set of data which is provided to applications consuming a web page. The meta information is not by definition displayed on a web page directly for users to see. It is used by other applications, like the browser bar or Facebook. The information is then displayed on the users device.
What is Open Graph?
It is the information that Facebook, LinkedIn and other social network use when creating a card to display a hyperlink.
While open graph may seem similar to other protocols, that’s because it is, many protocols have attempted to do similar things and have been superseded by other protocols. Open graph now seems to be used only for social cards.
Open graph elements on each page
Title
The title is a crucial aspect of any web page or website. It is the first thing that a user sees when they open the webpage, and it appears on the browser title bar, in search engine listings, and other places. The title should be brief, descriptive, and relevant to the content of the page. Most devices only display titles that are less than 60 characters long.
Root Page Title
The main title is displayed on the index page or site root. It is the title of the website and should be chosen carefully to represent what the website is about. A good page title should be short, memorable, and descriptive.
Each Page Title
Each page on a website can have a unique descriptive title. This helps search engines and users to understand what the page is about. A page title should be relevant to the content on the page and should accurately describe the page’s content.
Description
Each page and the root page can have a unique description. The description is a brief summary of what the page is about and should be between 50-160 characters long. A well-written description can entice users to click on the page and can also improve the page’s search engine ranking.
Social Images
Each page can have associated images that can be displayed in cards with applications like social media and messengers. These images can help users to identify the page when it is shared on social media or messaging apps. Social images should be of high quality and relevant to the content on the page. View the open graph protocol website
Many different platforms use other items but Facebook for example, using open graph a image should be 1200×630 pixels and no more than 8MB.
Other meta data systems
You can find information on the complete mdn standards here and the complete list of defined meta name here.
Format detection
When browsers read the text content of any element within a web page, it can determine any text content with a format that it understands, and then it can be enriched as a hyperlink. Each web page has the ability to declare if any format detection takes place within the window.
The client window parsing the text content remains in control if any format detection takes place. For example, text content within a button may not be altered by format detection, or any other element with right-click-enabled interfaces.
Structured content is a vast and evolving topic on its own. It refers to the use of structured data to make information on a website more accessible and organized. Structured data helps search engines and other third-party systems to understand the content on a webpage better. For more information on structured content, refer to the guide on the structured content page.
Favicons
Favicons are small images that are used in the small card form of browsers, like the URL bar. They help users to identify the website and make it easier to recognize when it is bookmarked or added to the home screen of a device. Favicons should be clear, simple, and relevant to the website. Favicons can easily be generated from a single image, this makes adding the multiple sizes for different devices quite simple.
Application Manifest
This definition of data enables devices like Android to support the Progressive web app features. A Progressive Web App (PWA) is a website that can be installed on a device like an application. This includes being able to save a web page as a home screen application. The application manifest includes the icon, name, and description of the PWA.
It requires some specific images to enable features like a splash screen. A splash screen is the screen that appears when the PWA is opened before the content is loaded. View the MDN docs
Color
Many devices and situations require an explicit definition of color to act appropriately. Explicitly defining a color can help ensure that the website looks consistent across different devices and platforms. It can also help users with color blindness to understand the content on the website better.
Automation
Websites require images for every page to be most effective. You might be thinking wait that’s a lot of images. And your right, it is, worse still there’re multiple different companies with different formats to support. Being able to automate this process has never been easier. You can use a combination of AI and generative AI to produce amazing content. However, by adding content only to the center of images and having simple designs you can often produce only a single image.
Many people like myself are not full time graphic designers, and we still want to create graphic design images of the highest quality without paying any money. Many application will limit the ways you can use the application to encourage you to buy the paid package. By using the free service of multiple tools you can create great images with zero cost.
For example, creating logos and featured images (1:1 aspect ratio) with Canva or GIMP, exporting them, and then using it as a as an asset when generating open graph images. A great tool for doing this with zero cost is pika.style.
You can upload the assets yourself or automate with an API, sending snippets to pika.style as the title and except and choosing a random stock image.
You may also either, add branding from a template in an editor like Canva or overlay branding to auto picked images.
Image creation
Recommended: image to favicon formats generator with good coverage - cthedot.de icongen
Favicon generator with text to icon capabilities - favicon
A static image generator if you have limited resources - liyasthomas banner
A free open source image editor for when extra effort is needed: GIMP
If you want to spend some more for top noch software - Adobe Illustrator
First create a logo like image, with a 1:1 aspect ratio. The image should be large and over 500px wide. Second, generate your image from using a web app or via a API/data-pipeline.
Results testing
As the meta information of each of your pages are designed to be displayed within a certain third party interfaces, not within the display of your webpages window. It is advisable to test the results. Each platform consuming your pages has their own method, but many also conform to open standards. Its also best to test on the platforms you are targeting as the differences can be subtle.
The following are some online services which display the results of the common standards.
Unlock the power of video integration on your website. Learn from industry experts and create compelling video content that captivates your audience. Boost engagement and maximize your online impact.
Producing great video content for a business website can be a daunting task, but it is a worthwhile investment that can help you connect with your audience in a powerful way. Video is a highly engaging medium that can help you communicate your message effectively and increase your website’s overall engagement. Here are some tips on how to produce great video content for your business website.
In recent years, creating good videos have become a powerful marketing vertical. One that extends beyond giving your customers a good visual experience while on your website. Search engines and their displays like YouTube and LinkedIn, are the perfect medium to push content to users passively. Since their algorithm is always trying to show content to users based on their recent activity. The activity trends can present good opportunities to create valuable content that will be organically shown to users. One of the major benefits of YouTube, when it comes to producing YouTube content, is the gap in expected quality. A simple example is just your work, a video of yourself building a website can make a great background music.
While your YouTube profile is a good place to host your video, it also pays to constantly promote your own website. By creating videos around your website structure, both can align to provide better value to users.
Define your goals
Before you start planning your video, it’s important to define your goals. What do you want to achieve with this video? Are you trying to increase brand awareness, generate leads, or drive conversions? Understanding your goals will help you determine the type of video you need to create, the target audience, and the message you want to convey.
Plan your video
Once you have defined your goals, it’s time to plan your video. This involves developing a script, creating a storyboard, and selecting the appropriate visuals. Your script should be concise, clear, and engaging. Your storyboard should provide a visual representation of your script, including the shots, angles, and transitions. And your visuals should be high-quality and relevant to your message. Checkout apps like Canva to see already created professional templates, this will help to inform you of other successful projects and inspire you to fill in the templates with your own ideas.
Choose the right equipment
The equipment you use can make or break your video. Using templates and software can also produce great results if you don’t have anything in the real world you want to promote. Simply a high-quality camera, microphone, and lighting will help you produce a professional-looking video that will engage your audience. You don’t need to spend a fortune on equipment, but you should invest in good quality tools that will help you achieve your goals. Even a video saying hello to your potential consumers helps to build credibility. In today’s world, anyone can create great videos with their modern smart phones, so you have no excuse.
Shoot your video
When shooting your video, it’s important to pay attention to the details. This includes the lighting, sound, and composition. Make sure your subject is well-lit, the sound is clear and crisp, and the composition is visually appealing. Take your time and shoot multiple takes to ensure you have enough footage to work with during editing.
Edit and post-produce your video
Editing is where your video comes to life. This is where you add music, titles, and transitions to create a polished final product. Editing can be time-consuming, but it’s essential to produce a professional-looking video. Once you have finished editing, it’s time to post-produce your video. This involves optimizing your video for your website, adding captions, and ensuring it’s accessible to all users.
Promote your video
Finally, it’s time to promote your video. Share it on your website, social media channels, and email marketing campaigns. Encourage your followers to share it with their networks and engage with your content. This will help you increase your reach and drive more traffic to your website.
App recommendations
Canva - Canva is a powerful tool to create great videos from templates and without any expertise.
Conclusion
In conclusion, producing great video content for a business website requires careful planning, attention to detail, and a focus on your goals. By following these tips, you can create a powerful video that will engage your audience, increase your website’s overall engagement, and help you achieve your business objectives.
6 - Structured Content: The Ultimate Guide
Maximising Your SEO Potential: A Guide to Utilising Structured Content for Improved Third-Party Applet Support. Learn about the rich results answer engines can provide about anything from organisations to merchant product listings.
Bing, Google, and many more have full support. Plus, it’s now a well-defined standard that is becoming increasingly relevant due to the advent of a new class of applications. Applications of many types (not just search engines) can utilise explicit data about relevant topics to build knowledge and contribute to performing functions.
As with all website features that are consumed by search or answer engines, it may take some time for any changes to be reflected in the engine’s results. First, a change must be found and then processed, and then the information must be chosen to be used. You can request individual engines to update their data. But it’s not always known how many applications are using your data.
Structured data, in particular, is a larger entity to create. Combining sources from multiple pages into a representation of a single entity. This increase in the number of sources causes some delay, and having few sources will not cause processing to go any faster. But it allows many websites to present data points about a particular entity and have them aggregated. For example, the reviews can be taken from many third-party websites and a first party website to create a total picture.
Structured data provides better exposure of your website contents to users who don’t click through to your website directly. It helps search engines and third parties improve their results by providing explicit information on topics that are defined by a standard. Information on the topics that engines are interested in can serve as a concise showcase of a particular page or section of a website. It can also help the engine understand content on the page that is not included within the structured content by relating it to some topic that it does understand. Structure data is designed to relay information about the URLs, which then provide further information or actions associated with a particular topic. It can be thought of as a database with a direct association to a web page and may link to other important pages.
Rich Applets
Search engines and applications can reach out to your structured content for up-to-date information.
Improve SEO
Provide search engines with up-to-date information to help them display better results.
Custom
Provide custom structure to your applications or analysis.
Case studies and examples
Adding structured data can enable search results that are more engaging to users and might encourage them to interact more with your website, which is called rich results. Here are some case studies of websites that have implemented structured data for their site:
Rotten Tomatoes added structured data to 100,000 unique pages and measured a 25% higher click-through rate for pages enhanced with structured data, compared to pages without structured data.
The Food Network has converted 80% of their pages to enable search features, and has seen a 35% increase in visits.
Rakuten has found that users spend 1.5x more time on pages that implemented structured data than on non-structured data pages, and have a 3.6x higher interaction rate on AMP pages with search features vs non-feature AMP pages.
Nestlé has measured pages that show as rich results in search have an 82% higher click-through rate than non-rich result pages.
Image of an organisations structured data in Google Maps listings.
For example, the Google Business listing you see on the map when you search, and in any Google search results, will use the structured data from related websites. Instead of the data from an account or data that Google has guessed.
Image of an organisation’s structured data in Google Search results.
Given that the website provides organisation data, it can also provide other data like opening hours information, product listings, galleries, and many more.
Common structured data features
The following is a selection of relevant third-party applet definitions for most businesses:
The standard allows you to submit lots of data, that engines can call to when processing information on a business or subject. And they encourage you to enter as much relevant data as possible. By enriching your existing content that users can view with information that a machine can understand. not all current points available in the standard are used by all the vendors consuming structure data, so keep your ear to the ground so to speak, as new, creative and novel approaches to displaying information are becoming more and more common.
A good example of a piece of data that is actively used by many applications is opening hours. Instead of inputting this data directly into all of the applications, your website can provide this information, and any third parties will find the information on your website. If a third-party application is serving data to a customer, they can reach out to your website to get the latest information before displaying it.
One useful piece of data that many third parties support is the ability to specify links to offers or products. As an offer is about a product, engines are able to infer a great deal of information about the offer itself, the intention of the content, and the actions users may want to take.
What is structured data in the context of a website?
A graph is a term used to describe the relationships between people, places, and products. It is a way of visualising how different entities are connected. In the world of technology, a graph is often used to represent data in a way that is easy to understand and analyze. In the world of SEO, it’s how crawlers may derive information on a particular topic from a website to use in their applications.
One example of how graphs can be used is in the context of local businesses. When you search for a local business address, the results can show you not only the address itself but also the agents who work at that address. This is possible because of the way that the graph represents the relationships between different entities.
Overall, the graph is an important tool for understanding complex data sets. By visualising the relationships between different entities, it becomes easier to make sense of large amounts of information.
Source of Truth
A source of truth is a term used to describe a data set that is considered authoritative and reliable. In the context of technology, this often means that the data is centrally managed and controlled. This is important because it allows third-party applications to use the data without having to worry about inconsistencies or inaccuracies.
One example of a source of truth is a database that contains information about a particular set of products. This database might be managed by a single company or organisation, but it can be used by a wide range of third-party applications to provide users with up-to-date information.
Overall, having a reliable source of truth is essential for ensuring that data is accurate and consistent across different applications and platforms.
Formats
As applications get smarter, less time will be spent searching for content, and more impressions will happen in many third-party user interfaces. While your page may have a clear call-to-action, any third-party applications require an explicit place to retrieve such information that is relevant to a particular page. The increasing number of features and platforms and the wide range of current standards are making stores of explicit data like this more important. Web pages are simple files and make a great place to store this information in an easily accessible format. This allows engines to all consume a single source of truth.
Using all available formats, like Open Graph, Twitter Cards, and Schema, is critical.
Open Graph, Twitter Cards, and Schema are all formats that are used to represent data in a way that is compatible with different platforms and applications. These formats are important because they allow developers to create applications that work seamlessly with different systems and services.
For example, Open Graph is a format that is used to represent data on Facebook. Twitter cards, on the other hand, are used to represent data on Twitter. By using these formats, developers can ensure that their applications work well on both platforms.
Robustness is a term used to describe the ability of a system to handle a wide range of inputs and outputs. In the context of technology, this means that a system should be able to handle different kinds of data and perform a wide range of tasks.
One example of robustness is a search engine that can handle queries in different languages and return results that are relevant and accurate. Another example may be a multitude of third-party applications using data from your source of truth. Popular applications like ChatGPT or other artificial intelligence may call out to get structured data from your website to answer a query. What events has hosting.snowdon.dev hosting recently? Does hosting.snowdon.dev have any coupons? Does Apple have a website? Give me the telephone number for the support team at hosting.snowdon.dev.
All of this is done should be done from a single source of truth, and as new applications are created, your data continues to be automatically integrated with them. This does not prevent data from being aggregated, but data must have authoritative source.
Overall, robustness is an important characteristic of any technological system. By being able to handle a wide range of inputs and outputs, a system can be more useful and effective for users.
Adding structured data to a website
To do this simply add a JSON-lt payload in the schema format within the head of a HTML document. Or instead, markup your HTML DOM elements.
How is structured content different from a website?
A website and structured data serve different purposes, despite both being related to the online world. A website is a collection of pages, images, videos, and other forms of multimedia that are hosted on a server and accessed through a web browser. It is a platform for publishing content, interacting with users, and showcasing products or services. On the other hand, structured data is a way of organising and presenting information in a standardised format that can be easily understood by machines.
Although a website can contain structured data, the two concepts are not interchangeable. A website is designed for human consumption, while structured data is designed for machine consumption. Structured data is a form of metadata that describes the content of a website in a way that can be easily understood by search engines, social media platforms, and other web applications.
Structured data is often used to enhance the visibility and effectiveness of a website by providing more information about its content. This information can be used to create rich snippets, knowledge graphs, and other types of search results that provide users with a better understanding of the content on the website.
In contrast, a website is designed to be visually appealing and engaging to human users. It can feature a variety of multimedia elements, such as images, videos, and animations, that are designed to capture the attention of visitors and keep them engaged with the content.
Overall, a website and structured data serve different purposes, but they can work together to create a more effective and engaging online presence. By incorporating structured data into a website, businesses can improve their visibility and attract more visitors while providing a better user experience.
The Importance of Structured and Unstructured Data in Website Development
In the world of website development, data is a crucial component that helps developers create effective and efficient websites. When it comes to data, there are two types: structured and unstructured. While structured data is well-organised and easy to manage, unstructured data is more complex and requires a more nuanced approach.
Structured data refers to data that is organised in a specific format, such as a specification. It is easy to manage and analyse, and it is typically used for specific purposes, such as tracking sales or customer data. Structured data is also easier to search for and retrieve, which makes it a valuable asset in website development. Structured data comes in the form of a predefined format or semantic HTML that enriches any webpage with generic structure.
On the other hand, unstructured data refers to data that is not organised in a specific format, such as text files, images, or video files. Unstructured data is more complex and requires a more nuanced approach to processing and analyzing it. However, unstructured data can also provide valuable insights into customer behaviour and preferences, which can be used to create more effective websites.
When it comes to website development, structured data is essential for creating effective applications. For example, structured data can be used to create a database of product information that can be used to power an online store. This data can be easily managed and analysed, which makes it easier to create effective product pages and search tools.
Unstructured data, on the other hand, can be used to create more personalised experiences for website visitors. For example, blog post content and comments can provide valuable insights into customer preferences, which can be used to create more effective marketing campaigns. Since search engines may only infer structure from HTML, they can gain little structured information other than the basic layout elements and the unstructured text contents. Many efforts are made to associate a piece of unstructured data with some content. For example, the alt attribute of an anchor element may add information to a hyperlink, but any association of that link to the particular product listing must be inferred. Its association is not structured. Many types of unstructured data may benefit from defining explicit structure.
In conclusion, structured and unstructured data are both important components of website development. While structured data is essential for creating effective applications, unstructured data can provide valuable insights into customer behaviour and preferences. By taking a nuanced approach to data management, website developers can create more effective and efficient websites that deliver a superior user experience.
Tips for Using Structured Data with Common Content Types
Structured Data Product and Merchant Listings
One of the most relevant pieces of data that websites offer are products listings. To get better rich results for these within answer engines, structured data can be added for the products. Once the structure data is captured in the answer engine listings, it can refer back to a particular webpage on your site. When a user interacts with a product listing, they may click through the rich result for a product and go directly to its own page. The website can then use its own checkout procedure to capture any conversion.
With AI applications empowering answer engines, many new ways of acquiring information about entities are becoming popular. Answer engines like Google have become more common and advanced. Newer engines powered by and designed specifically with integration with modern generative AI (for example, SearchGPT) allow your website listing on a search engine to be much more customised and provide more tailored information along with a predefined context within the generative AI prompt. The context given to a search for an organisation with structured data allows the engine to instantly understand additional requests without having to append those annoying phrases intended to disambiguate the correct content like “in the northeast” or “site:snowdon.dev”.
As these engines are building databases for their users to query, having structured content that targets these platforms can improve your impressions. An example of this might be looking for the opening hours sequence instead of a contact page containing your opening hours. And displaying the user’s opening hours within their own interfaces. Typical search engines already include answer engines (they provide data to the widgets), but many new types and interfaces are becoming available. Paying attention to your business’s domain and looking for any interesting ways users are searching for your product may pay dividends.
As businesses and search engines start rolling out new interfaces to display information for queries that can be disambiguated, many components of structured data can take prominence in the results of the answer engine. This should provide a richer experience to the user within the answer engine and help to navigate the web pages for the user.
Using the structure of entities related to a query, the answer engine can display information relevant not only to a particular section of a website but to multiple related websites as one cohesive piece. By understanding the links that are displayed and directing the user to different related parts of the web, links can be to a distinct website about a department of an internal web hosting organisation or to external pages providing information about a part of the organization. And many more, with new interfaces being added regularly.
Reviews
Using services like reviews.io you can manage your website’s reviews from within its interface. Review services offer many ways to easily integrate their features with your website. Or simply use it to gather reviews. Many other services also allow review submissions, and any website can push reviews to an entity’s structured content. Common providers include Yell and Google Business.
Any reviews will be linked to your entity through structured content and will be aggregated from all sources when displayed within an answer engine interface.
After finding your profile, look for a link to leave reviews. This simple hyperlink can be shown to users and provides a simple call-to-action to a leave-a-review process. However, the Google review process isn’t great. You may also consider implementing a more complete user flow. For example, to provide users with a coupon after submitting a review,.
FAQ
There are a number of free tools that may take a webpage and generate some questions from its content:
What is marketeer.snowdon.dev?
How can marketeer.snowdon.dev help improve my marketing strategies?
Is marketeer.snowdon.dev suitable for small businesses or only for larger companies?
Are there any specific industries that marketeer.snowdon.dev caters to?
Can marketeer.snowdon.dev integrate with other marketing tools and platforms?
The following is a list of third-party software offering free content generation:
Using the results produced by a generator, create definitions of each question and the answer to declare structured data for the relevant topic. Once indexed by search engines, FAQ structured data allows answer engines to easily enrich their applets with up-to-date information of major importance. This allows Google to pick exactly the correct data from a web page and states that it explicitly relates to an answer or question. Search engines often display the content of websites with enriched data higher than sites without.
Providing explicit data is a powerful tool to provide valuable information to users who receive an impression on any search engine but who don’t visit the website directly. Your existing content will often already include questions and answers to those questions. But it always helps to consult domain knowledge from various experts in the business industry, web development, artificial intelligence, and SEO. They can all offer insights. If you are contracting a freelancer, it would be best to have an expert in all those fields, including the domain of the questions. If you are doing all aspects yourself, paying attention to all the experts is currently a necessity since standards and technologies are changing.
To get the most benefit from the structured data about the website page, be sure to create an informative page that displays more related and useful information that a user can click through to. Within the questions and answers, try to provide any information that you think the user would like on a very first impression. By using the tools that provide recommendations based on existing content, you can find reliable and trusted questions and answers that users are actively searching for. If your competitors are not providing some critical information that users are seeking, then having an answer or question that addresses it would yield results.
Q: “What is the cost of n”, A: “We offer a free service, with optional paid extra (we allow x for free)”
Q: “Where can we delivery”, A: “We can delivery through the north east of n”
7 - Links: The Importance of Internal Linking
Dive into the world of internal links and understand how they offer rich information to search engines by mapping out the relationships between various sections on your website. Enhance your site’s visibility and user engagement with effective linking strategies.
How do internal links provide rich information to search engines?
Each link on your website provides valuable information about how a section relates to other sections. Search engines produce such directed graphs to infer insights about the structure of your website. No longer do site maps provide all the information necessary for Google’s complicated algorithms. A clear hierarchical structure is also formed by the mapping from directories to URLs. This information forms a directed graph with the condition that any child item may have only one parent. The directed graph of your website defines associations between the sections.
Links are enriched by the user’s devices. Links can be a call to action for many native functions of the users’ devices. Some external links to your page do not hold any page ranking weight. This can include many in places on common websites like facebook.com etc.
PageRank flows around a website via internal links (links from one page on the site to another).
For example, some of this article’s PageRank flows to the other pages on our site via hyperlinks. In general, higher PageRank equates to higher rankings. Gary Illyses confirmed this last year.
DYK that after 18 years we're still using PageRank (and 100s of other signals) in ranking?
— Gary 鯨理／경리 Illyes (so official, trust me) (@methode) February 9, 2017
How do users get extra value from great links?
In addition to the search engine optimization benefits, links play an important role in user experience. Well-placed links can help users navigate complex topics and find the information they need quickly and easily. By providing clear and relevant links between pages, users can move seamlessly between different sections of your website, making their overall experience more enjoyable and efficient. Therefore, it is important to ensure that links are placed strategically and labeled appropriately to enhance user experience and engagement.
How do external links add value?
Links to third-party websites and links from third-party websites are essential for building a graph of related and validated content associations. By linking to high-quality external resources, you can provide additional context and value to your users. Additionally, linking to well-established and reputable sources can help establish your website as a trusted authority in your niche.
Moreover, when other websites link to your content, it signals to search engines that your website is a credible and authoritative source of information. This can improve your website’s search engine rankings and increase your visibility to potential users.
However, it is important to ensure that the external links you include on your website are relevant, trustworthy, and add value to your users. Similarly, it is crucial to build high-quality content that other websites would want to link to. By doing so, you can create a network of interlinked content that improves user experience, builds your brand reputation, and positively impacts your search engine optimization efforts. In is also important to keep your links working. There any many standard tools available to automate this process, but is is worth noting..
Tips when creating internal links
Permanent links: preserving features.
Links often behave directly like filesystems. While their content may change or new entries can be added, it is hard to make changes to large collections of links by changing the name of a parent directory without effecting its children.
Keeping links permanent allows your emails and other documents to stay rich by preserving the link’s ability to resolve to the indented content.
Creating permanent links to each of your pages allows you to create links that are not the primary link. Which can allow you some flexibility when changing any links. Imagine. /Docs/one and /Docs/two, if /Docs changes, so does each of its children. For example, /Docs changes to /Guide, now its two children are /Guide/one and \Guide/two.
A change like this would break any existing links to the old path; instead, it’s best to use permanent links to pages that are crucial. Take our example of /Docs/one, instead of linking to this page as /Docs/one, create a separate link for this page, a permanent one. Like /one-permanent. Now you can change the parent of one freely.
Other methods exist, if needed, however using server redirects can get complicated.
Link target errors
Absolute vs relative URLs
When creating links on a website, it’s important to ensure that the target of the link is correct. This is especially important when specifying links to internal pages on the same website.
One common mistake is to reference the relative path of the internal link without including the / prefix. When this happens, web crawlers may append the path to the link source path, leading to issues with crawling and indexing.
This can result in crawlers repeatedly requesting pages in a loop, which can significantly impact the website’s performance and the crawling process. This loop only ends when a certain threshold is reached, causing major issues with the website’s visibility and accessibility in search engine results.
To avoid this issue, it’s essential to carefully specify the correct target of internal links and ensure that the links are properly formatted with the correct prefixes to prevent crawling issues. Using the absolute URL is always the preferred option where it can be used.
While using a correctly formed relative URL is often the preferred or best practice people turn to. Often because it enables the links to navigate to a new page or resource without making the website content data be bound to an explicit origin. This enables the website owner to develop on the website, or use the website to be used with other origins very easily. However, this approach is not the best possible approach. Instead, prefer to interpolate your website baseURL in places where it’s required.
