WordPress is a SEO friendly platform provides permalinks and an organized content hierarchy making it easier for Google and other search engines to crawl the website’s overall content. With that said, SEO plugins are used as an adjunct to maximize WordPress’s SEO capabilities and improve the website’s organic potential. That’s all well and good, but where does schema markup fit into the SEO equation? If you are an owner of a WordPress website, schema markup should be an integral part of your website to produce incredible search results with your website.
What is Schema?
Schema Markup is added into specific parts of the website to provide more context about the content whenever the Search Engine is crawling your website or the said parts of your site. This context provided by Schema Markup helps to ensure that Googlebot crawling your website lists the crawled pages with more relevance for a particular subject matter. And if you know anything about SEO, then it’s the fact that relevance reigns supreme for organic rankings. All in all, structured data/Schema will help you to send the right signals to Google about your content resulting in improved relevance and better SEO results ultimately.
You can refer the details required to be added in a webpage for any specific schema in Schema.org website.
Importance of Adding Schema
Well, it’s no secret that Schema Markup has been around for a while now and is sometimes referred to as Structured Data or Micro-Data. Now in 2022, as Google’s algorithm continuously evolves, it is also becoming more and more context centric. Hence, it is important to present sitewide information properly to ensure Search Engines can understand what the content is actually about. This is where Schema Markup comes into the picture. By implementing Schema Markup your WordPress site will benefit in more ways than one such as, improvement in search rankings, boosted click-through rates and enhanced usability and overall user-experience. Essentially, Schema Markup is a code that you include in your website to help Search Engines recommend more relevant results to the end user. In all honesty, it is more so for the user than for search engines.
Adding Schema Markup in WordPress
So, now that we’ve gone over what Schema Markup is, and why it needs to be incorporated, let’s discuss how we can properly add Schema Markup in our website. The process for implementing Schema Markups throughout your website and on single posts is a rather simple one, thanks to some great WordPress plugins. We’ll go over a couple of these plugins and all the steps involved while implementing Schema Markup on WordPress in the next part of this article.
Schema Plugin
The Schema plugin as the name suggests, pretty much does everything you need in regard to adding Schema Markup on a WordPress website. The plugin has some cool features such as category or post based schema types and uses JSON-LD (linked data format) which is supported by Google and Bing. To add Schema Markup with this plugin, you’ll have to first install and activate this plugin.
After installing and activating the plugin, you’ll now be able to use the plugin to implement Schema Markup site wide. Firstly, you’ll have to open the plugin’s setting page where you must fill out general information such as site type, organization name, URL, and logo, as shown in the images below.
As you can see below, in the Knowledge Graph tab, we’ve included basic information such as website representation, name, URL and logo. Feel free to do so and click on “Save Changes” for updates to take effect.
Next, open the “Quick Configuration Wizard” tab to set up the plugin properly.
The wizard will mainly ask you questions in relation to site type, company information, content markup, and social media profiles. Fill in relevant information and complete the setup wizard.
Next, you’ll be prompted to a page where you’ll be able to edit the custom Schema types. You can add any other custom post type by clicking on the Add New button. Here you’ll be able to select the Schema type that best aligns with the content, assign an appropriate article type, and include meta data of the post or page as well. Apart from that, you can also add premium extensions to the plugin from Schema>Extensions to add enhanced functionality to your Schema applied WordPress site.
Yoast SEO
Whenever we need anything, SEO related on WordPress, we cannot forget Yoast, can we? It is undoubtedly the best SEO plugin out there and offers Schema capabilities as well. However, it is not focused primarily on Schema Markup, and as a result is not as powerful as other plugins in this regard. But chances are if you have a WordPress site, you will most likely be using Yoast for SEO, so it might be in your best interest to continue with Yoast than to try another one as most SEO plugins conflict with each other when used in conjunction.
When you first set up Yoast on your WordPress, you’ll most likely have gone through one of their configuration workouts. If not, you can always do so from Yoast > General.
Here, you’ll be asked to enter information pertaining to your company such as name, logo, site tagline, social profiles and more. All of this is just Yoast attaining the required information it needs to implement Schema on your website.
Once you’ve completed the configuration workout and included all the relevant info into the plugin’s knowledge graph, Yoast will add data types and set up Schema Markups automatically based on the site type selected.
Types of Schemas
There are various schemas that you can add to any specific page in your WordPress site. The best examples include:
- Review
- FAQ
- How-to
You may need to use specific plugin to add these schemas to specific pages in your site. For example, you can make use of the Yoast Structured Data blocks such as How-to and FAQ to add respective schemas to specific pages. Furthermore, you will always find Yoast’s Schema tab on every post or page where you can select the article and page type to enhance content relevance.
Final Remarks
And that’s about it for this article in relation to Schema Markups. We hope that this post will help you to understand why Schema Markups are an important aspect of user convenience and SEO and how you can implement it on your website and get one step closer to better SEO results down the line.