Google has updated documentation for Article Structured Data covering Article, NewsArticle, and BlogPosting. This update is intended to make the title property more compliant with guidance on title elements and title links.
Let’s understand better what this update is and how it impacts marketing strategies.
What Is Article Structured Data?
Structured data is a standardized format that serves to provide information about a page, helping Google rank the content on that page more accurately.
Understanding the content of a page can be very demanding on Google Search. So, as an experienced SEO or content producer, you can provide clear information to Google about a page by including structured data on it.
Including structured data can help search results be more compatible with what users are looking for, improve search calls, and encourage users to interact more with your site. For example, ZipRecruiter achieved a 4.5 times higher conversion rate by adding structured data to their recruiting page, and StyleCraze improved their site’s CTR by 1.2 times by leveraging structured data on their pages.
In this way, using Article structured data—and its variants (NewsArticle and BlogPosting)—qualifies your webpage for a better search, increasing the chances of success for your article or ad.
About Structured Data for Titles…
This change in guidelines especially affects the title property, which is usually reproduced in the title element in metadata.
Google’s original recommendation was that the header or title of an article should not exceed 110 characters. Now, with new guidance on title data, Google has said it no longer has restrictions on article title length, but that titles need to be concise anyway, as long titles may not appear in full on some devices.
Title Guidelines You Need to Know
Title link guidance advises on some best practices to influence the relevance of results. A good title helps give a quick sense of the content, helping the user decide whether or not to click on your web page. Therefore, it is essential to use high-quality title links to achieve good results with your website.
Some of the best practices for titles recommended by Google are:
- Verify that each page of your site has a title specified in the <title> element.
- Write concise, descriptive content for your <title> elements.
- Avoid excessive keywords in the descriptions in the <title> element.
- Avoid repeated or patterned text in <title> elements.
- Make it clear what the main title of the page is.
- Be careful not to allow search engines to crawl your pages when using robots.txt on the site.
- Use the same language and writing system as the main content of the pages.
In general, it is very important that you try to be concise and communicate the maximum amount of information with the minimum of words, making users interested in your page among the thousands of search results that Google offers.
Do you want to continue to be updated with Marketing best practices? I strongly suggest that you subscribe to The Beat, Rock Content’s interactive newsletter. There, you’ll find all the trends that matter in the Digital Marketing landscape. See you there!
