Structured Data in WordPress

by Koen Van den Wijngaert

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Structured Data in WordPress By Koen Van den Wijngaert

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We need a way to comb through and make sense of an enormous amount of data.

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But... Why?

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I have a dream for the Web become capable of analyzing all the data on the Web – the content, links, and transactions between people and computers. A "Semantic Web", which makes this possible, has yet to emerge, but when it does, the day-to-day mechanisms of trade, bureaucracy and our daily lives will be handled by machines talking to machines. Tim Berners-Lee, 1999

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Semantic Web “The ultimate goal of Semantic Web is to make the machine to understand the Internet data.” ✓ Technology to describe concepts, relationships between things, and categories of things ✓ Focus on linking and relations: Giant Global Graph

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WIKIDATA ✓ Open data set van Wikimedia Foundation ✓ 65,351,490 data items that anyone can edit ✓ Used in 58.4% of all English Wikipedia articles ✓ Advanced query service

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Overall causes of death

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Number of battles per year, per country Syria (8) Iraq (5) Ukraine (1)

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Musicians born in Antwerp, ordered by sitelinks Laura Tesoro Belgian actor and singer 28 André Cluytens French conductor 15 Ann Christy Belgian singer 13 Karel Goeyvaerts Belgian composer 13 Dirk Verbeuren Belgian drummer 12 Jacobus Barbireau musician 11 Carl Verbraeken Belgian composer 10 Tom Barman Belgian musician and film director 10 Albert Grisar Belgian composer 10 Jos Van Immerseel Flemish harpsichordist, pianist and conductor 9

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Structured Data Making sense of copious amounts of data

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Structured Data ✓ A common way of categorizing data ✓ Standard way of structuring this data in a machine readable format What do we need?

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Structured Data ✓ Schemas are types of structured data eg: Person, Place, Event, ... ✓ Sets of schemas are called vocabularies ✓ Most used vocabularies are: Dublin Core, FOAF and Schema.org A common way of categorizing data

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Schema.org Type Hierarchy Thing CreativeWork Article Book Event Person Organization Place Festival SocialEvent .. . WebSite Patient Residence Accommodation .. . Corporation LocalBusiness NGO

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Structured Data ✓ RDFa 1.1 Lite ✓ Microdata ✓ JSON-LD Structuring data in a machine readable format

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Example ✓ Name ✓ Genre ✓ Director ✓ Trailer http://schema.org/Movie

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RDFa 1.1 Lite

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Microdata

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JSON-LD

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Choosing a format.

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We currently prefer JSON-LD markup. I think most of the new structured data that are kind of come out for JSON-LD ﬁrst. So that’s what we prefer. John Mueller, Webmaster Trends Analyst at Google

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Advanced Uses of Structured Data

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Advanced Usages ✓ Email Marketing ✓ Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) ✓ Screenreaders eg: Speakable ✓ Google Ads ✓ Knowledge Graph ✓ Digital Assistants eg: Using Actions, Speakable ✓ API-Platform

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Email Marketing: actions

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Email Marketing: Highlights

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Accelerated Mobile Pages Fast, optimized versions of your website pages served directly from the search engine’s cache. AMP also heavily relies on structured data.

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Knowledge Graph

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Knowledge Graph

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Implementing Structured Data

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Implementing Structured Data In a WordPress website ✓ General guidelines ✓ Commonly used types ✓ Using GTM ✓ Coding it yourself ✓ PHP libraries ✓ WordPress Plugins

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Implementing Structured Data ✓ Add markup to the page it describes ✓ Be as speciﬁc as possible when choosing a type ✓ Only markup for content that is shown on the page ✓ Don’t block these pages from search indexing Some general guidelines from Google: developers.google.com/search/docs/guides/intro-structured-data#structured-data-guidelines

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Common types for SEO ✓ Organization For Google’s knowledge graph ✓ Search box Provides support for a search box in your site links ✓ Breadcrumbs ✓ videoObject These types will make the biggest difference.

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Common types for SEO E-Commerce ✓ Product ✓ Offer ✓ Review Blog ✓ Article NewsArticle & BlogPosting ✓ ClaimReview ✓ CriticReview

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Common types for SEO Other types ✓ Recipe ✓ HowTo ✓ Event ✓ Courses ✓ Job Postings

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Implementing Structured Data A few options.

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Google Tag Manager It is often recommended on the web to add structured data with Google Tag Manager. Although it is possible, it’s strongly discouraged to do so. Structured data should be added directly in the source code, not loaded in using JavaScript.

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Coding it yourself

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✓ torann/json-ld ✓ spatie/schema-org Install them using Composer or by downloading the source directly. Coding it yourself Using PHP libraries

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spatie/schema-org

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spatie/schema-org

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✓ Schema Pro ✓ Schema ✓ Yoast SEO ✓ WordLift * Non exhaustive list. WordPress Plugins Plugins providing schema.org markup integration

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Schema Pro

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Schema + (Schema Premium)

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Yoast SEO ✓ Takes care of data like Organisation and BlogPost ✓ Structured Data Blocks ✓ Entity Graphs ✓ Extensible using premium plugins (eg: local SEO)

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Yoast SEO

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Yoast SEO: Structured Blocks

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Yoast SEO: Structured Blocks Example: FAQ Block

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Yoast SEO: Structured Blocks Example: FAQ Block

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Yoast SEO: Structured Blocks Example: FAQ Block

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Yoast SEO: Entity Graph An entity graph is a representation of a topic, which describes the entities — people, places and things, for instance — and deﬁnes their relationships via properties. Or in this case, how your site is connected to your pages, organization, authors et cetera.

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Yoast SEO: Entity Graph Very easy to hook into using hooks and ﬁlters.

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WordLift Uses AI to automatically analyse and classify your content for you, while you type. WordLift helps you organize posts and pages adding facts, links and media to build beautifully structured websites, for both humans and search engines.

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WordLift

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Tools ✓ Schema markup generator ✓ Google Structured Data Testing Tool ✓ Steal our ld+json ✓ JSON-LD Schema Generator by Merkle

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Thanks for listening! @vdwijngaert Koen Van den Wijngaert SiteOptimo.com