Small Business Schema & Microformatting

Local Business SchemaIf you are a small to medium business and you want to rank on Google one of the things you will need is a website. It doesn’t need much on it: Who you are, what you do and where are you at. You can use microformatting from schema.org to mark up your vital statistics on your website.

NAP

No I’m not suggesting you sleep for a short period of time. NAP stands for Name Address and Phone number. These are the best indicators for your business online.

Consistent Business Data

Sit down and figure yourself out. If your business is Warren Peace, located at 1234 W That Pl in Suite 6, in This Town, ST 00000 and can be contacted at (123) 456-7890 you need to specify how it will be displayed:

Would it be:
Warren Peace
1234 W That Pl, Suite 6
This Town, ST 00000
(123) 456-7890
Or will it be:
Warren Peace
1234 West That Place, # 6
This Town, ST 00000-0000
(123) 456-7890

Same location, many different ways of saying it. Figure it out, make a decision and make sure you always use that format everywhere on the internet. Google is looking for consistency. Sometimes a businesses will have similar addresses or names. The more consistent you are, the easier it is for Google to say “yep that’s them.”

Business Microformatting

Ok, let’s get down to brass tacks and mark up some NAPs. Using Schema.org I’ve grabbed the LocalBusiness and PostalAddress microformatting to create the listing below:

<div itemscope itemtype=”http://schema.org/LocalBusiness”>
<p><span itemprop=”name”>Warren Peace</span><br />
<div itemprop=”address” itemscope itemtype=”http://schema.org/PostalAddress”>
<span itemprop=”streetAddress”>1234 W That Pl</span>,  Suite 6
<span itemprop=”addressLocality”>This Town</span>, <span itemprop=”addressRegion”>ST</span> <span itemprop=”postalCode”>0000</span>
</div>
Phone: <span itemprop=”telephone”>(123) 456-7890</span><br />
Email: <a href=”mailto:thisguy@thatplace.com>Email Us</a><meta itemprop=”email” content=”office@simonsendental.com” /></p>

<p>Office Hours<br />
Monday – Thursday: 7am – 4pm <meta itemprop=”openingHours” content=”Mo-Th 8:00-17:00″ /><br />
Friday – Saturday: 8am – 4pm <meta itemprop=”openingHours” content=”Th 8:00-22:00″ /></p>
</div>

This is a standard block of information you might find on a business’ Contact Us page. You can copy and paste this into your own website’s html. If you want to know more about it, read on.

Reading Microformatting?

Yes, it’s not as hard as it sounds. Put all the data in a container called <div>. I then said this container defines the itemscope of the containter and referenced LocalBusiness. I then put each piece of data in it’s own span container and defined the items property with the itemprop=”” attribute. If you are wondering how I know what itemprops are available visit the URL in the itemtype. That will take you to the page where the item is defined.

At Schema.org

Yup. Now you will notice the address is a sub item that I put in it’s own container with it’s own itemscope and itemtype. I made sure it’s part of the LocalBusiness by adding the itemprop=”address” to it. You can use other types (like ratings), but they might not give you as much bang for your buck.

Other Microdata

I also wanted to put in the email and hours. They might not be formatted right to use as the actual data. Their email is not Email Us. So I dropped these in <meta> tags. The hours use universal time codes, but they should be pretty easy to understand as it.

Done!

Now go mark up your site.

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