Highlighting Data for an Architecture Firm

Question

I'm doing some design work for an architecture firm here in town over the next few weeks. They had a very lacking website previously and want something newer and easier to use. In the process they asked if I could go in an do some basic stuff to optimize for Search Engines.

They are a pretty well respected firm locally so they already have pretty good page rank locally but like anyone else they want to be as high as possible and be as relevant as possible to what different people are searching.

Outside of doing other things to help Google better crawl and under stand the data on the pages I decided to go into their data high lighter and tag various information.

For the most part it is all rather straight forward and easy to understand for me as someone who has limited experience with this.

What I don't really know what to do is what category should I put their portfolio page under?

At first I started out as local businesses because they are a local business and have photos of local businesses with information for the name of the business and space they designed. They have them then separated out into categories for all the different type of work they do.

I tagged the categories and their company information as well and it kept giving me a warning saying Google can't quite figure out the category structure.

Would it be better to tag the portfolio items as products even knowing they aren't for sale. They are just space design and building shots of what they've designed.

In a sense I guess they could also be articles maybe. Even knowing they aren't really articles they are just a portfolio of pictures with a minor amount of text descriptions at the bottom.

So what I'm generally asking here to not be so long winded is what is the best way to highlight data in a mostly image portfolio in Google Web Master tools. Specifically what category should I sort the high lighted data into?

Answer 1

I think you're really overcomplicating your data markup. Ask yourself, why is data markup important?

1. A more visually appealing display in the SERPs that creates a higher CTR, authorship was the spectacle of this until Google got rid of the pretty picture that came with it.

2. To help Google understand your data.

Focus on 1 before you worry about 2. If you aren't sure what category fits the portfolio pages best, look here to see all possible markup options on Schema.org. Article is your safest bet, I would just go with that because no markup is going to create a relevant improvement in your SERP display, and article is not going to be an incorrect data classification.