Schema markup is a form of microdata, J-SON, i.e., a piece of code installed on a website, which helps search engines understand and interpret web pages. Once schema markup is installed on a webpage, it has the potential to create a rich snippet—an enhanced description which could include images, event details, reviews, and more—that appears in the search results and is greatly beneficial from an SEO perspective.
At its core, Schema.org is about standardizing and simplifying the process of adding semantic markup to web pages and providing tangible benefits for doing so. The most visible and measurable benefit comes in the form of rich snippet results. For the hotel sites, we see these rich results come in the form of star ratings, price range, and reviews in search results.
Schema.org, founded by Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and Yandex in 2011, is the collaborative community tasked with the mission to create, maintain, and promote schemas for structured data (vocabularies) on the Internet, web pages, and beyond.
In its inception, Search engine companies’ main goal was to help with semantic search. For example, the difference between when a user searches for Apple, the company, and apple, the fruit. Does the company or the fruit populate the search results? Schema markup data implementation on sites help the search engines understand what content on web pages are truly about and return the best search result based on this information.
Today over 10 million websites use Schema.org to markup their web pages. Many applications from Google, Microsoft, Pinterest, Yandex, and others already use these vocabularies to power rich, extensible experiences.
Why is schema markup important for hotel websites?
Schema markup helps search engines “understand” the content and intent of websites, especially dynamic content elements many hotel websites have such as events and happenings, special offers, opening hours, and star ratings. The rich snippets make a hotel’s web pages appear more prominently in search engine results pages (SERPs), thus improving visibility of a hotel website’s overall SEO, SERP click-through rates, and more.
