Schema
Unfinished article
Adding structured data to a website can make the content make more sense to search engine bots. It can also be used to improove the site in search results by including a logo, images, ratings, search bar or links to different sections of the site.
There are many types of schema and even more sub-types. The sub-types are at the bottom of each page on schema.org
Recommended schema types
There are over 600 schema types. Here are 9 recommended ones:
- Organization includes name, link to your logo, description and address.
- Website allows a site search box on your site to appear in search results. However you need Google authority to have a high enough ranking for this to work.
- Product is for eCommerce websites.
- AggregateRating displays ratings and a review snippet in the search results.
- BlogPosting
- FAQPage can add some questions in the search results.
- Event
- Recipe
- VideoObject
Google’s guidelines
There are many guidelines both general and for specific schema. Some of the general ones include:
- Content must be visible
- Markup must be complete
- Schema should be placed on the page that it applies to (not all on the home page OR every schema on all pages)
Here’s an example from Google of the main Hugo site, https://gohugo.io
Formats
HTML microdata
The method adds HTML microdata tags to HTML elements.
RDFa
JSON LD
This is Google’s recommended format. It’s added to the <head> of a page using script tags with the type for JSON LD:
1<script type="application/ld+json">
2 // code here...
3</script>
Unlike Microdata and RDFa there is no need to edit HTML tags.
You can add schema to your markup via a plugin, manually or use a schema generator such as one on TechnicalSEO.com
Testing
This page has the following resources
- google-hugo.png
- unsplash.png