Markup

What Is Markup?

Without clean markup, search engines can’t properly interpret your content, and rich results remain out of reach. Markup connects the technical SEO layer with visibility in search results: structured data like Schema.org transforms a plain search result into an eye-catching rich snippet with review stars, FAQ entries, or price information.

Markup is the structured annotation of web content through HTML tags and schema markup (structured data), which helps search engines correctly understand and categorize content. Examples: <h1> tags for headings, <p> tags for paragraphs, JSON-LD for schema markup (e.g., Product, Article, Organization, FAQPage). Good markup makes pages more SEO-friendly and enables rich results in search results.

Technically, markup is defined in the HTML source code. HTML semantic markup (<h1>, <nav>, <article>, <section>) helps search engines understand page structure. Schema markup (www.schema.org) is additional structured data markup that provides specific information such as product prices, reviews, or event details. Google uses schema markup to display rich results (stars for reviews, prices, availability). Validation tools like Google’s Structured Data tester check markup for errors.

In practice, you should implement at minimum: semantic HTML (h1–h6, nav, article, footer), meta tags (title, description, viewport), Open Graph tags (for social sharing), and schema markup for your content types (Article, Product, LocalBusiness, FAQPage). Use JSON-LD format as it is the easiest to implement. Check schema markup regularly with Google’s Structured Data tester and fix errors quickly.