Adding schema markup to your WordPress pages can significantly enhance your presence on the search engine results page. This practice enables search engines to understand your content better, thereby improving your click-through rate and overall SEO performance. In this article, we'll explore how to insert schema in WordPress pages effectively.
Schema markup is a form of metadata that helps search engines interpret the context of your content. It uses a conceptual model to categorize and label the information on your pages. The most commonly used vocabulary for schema markup is found on Schema.org. By adding schema, you can create rich snippets that stand out in the search engine results page, which can enhance your website's visibility and click-through rate.
Yoast SEO is a popular WordPress plugin that helps in optimizing your site for search engines. It offers built-in support for schema markup.
Install and Activate Yoast SEO:
Configure Schema Settings:
Yoast SEO simplifies the process, but it might not cover all types of schema markup.
Plugins like Schema Pro offer more advanced options for adding schema markup.
Install and Activate Schema Pro:
Configure the Plugin:
For those comfortable with editing source code, you can manually add schema markup using the text editor.
Edit the Page:
Add Schema Markup:
<div itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Product">
<span itemprop="name">Product Name</span>
<span itemprop="description">Product Description</span>
<span itemprop="price">29.99</span>
</div>Custom fields can also be used to add schema markup.
Enable Custom Fields:
Add Custom Fields:
Adding schema markup to your WordPress pages is an excellent way to improve your site's visibility on the search engine results page and enhance your click-through rate. Whether you use plugins like Yoast SEO or Schema Pro, or manually add schema using the text editor, the benefits to your SEO efforts are substantial. By following the methods and best practices outlined in this article, you'll be well on your way to making your content more accessible and appealing to both search engines and users.
JSON-LD (JavaScript Object Notation for Linked Data) is a method of encoding Linked Data using JSON. It allows data to be serialized in a way that is easy for machines to parse and generate, while also being easy for humans to read and write. JSON-LD is used to structure data on the web and facilitate data interchange between systems in a way that is consistent with the principles of Linked Data.
 |
|
| Abbreviation | schema |
|---|---|
| Year started | 2011 |
| Latest version | 15.0 (2022-10-25)[1] |
| Organization | Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft, Yandex |
| Base standards | URI, HTML5, RDF, Microdata, ISO 8601 |
| Related standards | RDFa, Microformat, RDFS, OWL, N-Triples, Turtle, JSON, JSON-LD, CSV |
| Domain | Semantic Web |
| License | CC-BY-SA 3.0 |
| Website | schema |
Schema.org is a reference website that publishes documentation and guidelines for using structured data mark-up on web-pages (called microdata). Its main objective is to standardize HTML tags to be used by webmasters for creating rich results (displayed as visual data or infographic tables on search engine results) about a certain topic of interest.[2] It is a part of the semantic web project, which aims to make document mark-up codes more readable and meaningful to both humans and machines.
Schema.org is an initiative launched on June 2, 2011, by Bing, Google and Yahoo![3][4][5] (operators of the world's largest search engines at that time)[6] to create and support a common set of schemas for structured data markup on web pages. In November 2011, Yandex (whose search engine is the largest in Russia) joined the initiative.[7][8] They propose using the schema.org vocabulary along with the Microdata, RDFa, or JSON-LD formats[9] to mark up website content with metadata about itself. Such markup can be recognized by search engine spiders and other parsers, thus granting access to the meaning of the sites (see Semantic Web). The initiative also describes an extension mechanism for adding additional properties.[10] In 2012, the GoodRelations ontology was integrated into Schema.org.[11] Public discussion of the initiative largely takes place on the W3C public vocabularies mailing list.[12]
Much of the vocabulary on Schema.org was inspired by earlier formats, such as microformats, FOAF, and OpenCyc.[13] Microformats, with its most dominant representative hCard, continue (as of 2015) to be published widely on the web, where the deployment of Schema.org has strongly increased between 2012 and 2014.[14] In 2015,[15] Google began supporting the JSON-LD format, and as of September, 2017 recommended using JSON-LD for structured data whenever possible.[16][17]
Despite the advantages of using Schema.org, adoption remained limited as of 2016. A survey in 2016 of 300 US-based marketing agencies and B2C advertisers across industries showing only 17% uptake.[18]
Such validators as the deprecated[19] Google Structured Data Testing Tool, or more recent[20] Google Rich Results Test Tool,[21] Schema.org Markup Validator,[22] Yandex Microformat validator,[23] and Bing Markup Validator[24] can be used to test the validity of the data marked up with the schemas and Microdata. More recently, Google Search Console (formerly webmaster tools) has provided a report section for unparsable structured data. If any Schema code on a website is incorrect, it will show in this report.[25] Some schema markups such as Organization and Person are commonly used to influence search results returned by Google's Knowledge Graph.[26]
There are a number of items that a web page can be marked up with using a Schema, with examples including:
The following is an example[27] of how to mark up information about a movie and its director using the Schema.org schemas and microdata. In order to mark up the data, the attribute itemtype along with the URL of the schema is used. The attribute itemscope defines the scope of the itemtype. The kind of the current item can be defined by using the attribute itemprop.
<div itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Movie">
<h1 itemprop="name">Avatar</h1>
<div itemprop="director" itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Person">
Director: <span itemprop="name">James Cameron</span>
(born <time itemprop="birthDate" datetime="1954-08-16">August 16, 1954</time>)
</div>
<span itemprop="genre">Science fiction</span>
<a href="../movies/avatar-theatrical-trailer.html" itemprop="trailer">Trailer</a>
</div>
<div vocab="http://schema.org/" typeof="Movie">
<h1 property="name">Avatar</h1>
<div property="director" typeof="Person">
Director: <span property="name">James Cameron</span>
(born <time property="birthDate" datetime="1954-08-16">August 16, 1954</time>)
</div>
<span property="genre">Science fiction</span>
<a href="../movies/avatar-theatrical-trailer.html" property="trailer">Trailer</a>
</div>
<script type="application/ld+json">
{
"@context": "http://schema.org/",
"@type": "Movie",
"name": "Avatar",
"director":
{
"@type": "Person",
"name": "James Cameron",
"birthDate": "1954-08-16"
},
"genre": "Science fiction",
"trailer": "../movies/avatar-theatrical-trailer.html"
}
</script>
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