Schema tags can provide search engines with more data and make better use of other tools such as social media platforms and Google knowledge panels. If used properly, it can qualify your web page to display special SERP features, thereby increasing your visibility in search results.

You can add this tag to your site in a variety of ways, such as installing plug-ins or manually adding the correct code.

In this article, we will explain what Schema tags are, show you some of the benefits, and illustrate them with examples. You will also learn how to add Schema tags to a WordPress site.

What is a structured data tag?

Schema tags are a kind of metadata (called microdata), a special type of HTML code that is added to WordPress sites to provide search engines with more information about the content. In the past, we used HTML tags to provide this kind of information to search engines.

Title tags, meta-descriptions, and meta-keywords (no longer applicable) can all tell search engines about the content of the site. However, this does not provide search engines with all the information they need to fully understand the content of the site and the users they attract. This requires adding Schema tags to the WordPress.

The Schema tag is added to the HTML of the site page. It gives each element additional attributes, such as what information they contain and what the context is.

For example, you might see something like this on the page:

   
   
Avatar
   Director: James Cameron (born August 16, 1954)   Science fiction   Trailer 
 

The Schema tag adds an extra layer of data to your content. It tells search engines that it’s about an organization, a person, a place, or even a movie.

This means that when people search for this content, they are more likely to get accurate results. This not only makes your page more likely to appear in search results, but also makes you more likely to get an accurate knowledge panel in Google, effectively link your social media account to your site, and improve search rankings.

We can better explain this by showing you how to use Schema tags and examples of the information provided. We’ll see soon.

For example, you can tell search engines that a particular page is a blog article, recipe, FAQ, news article, or product page in an online mall. Search engines can then use this data to display rich results.

Search engines such as Google also use structured data tags to display information from other searches. For example, in a Google map, your list shows the route, business hours, company phone number, and so on.

These enhanced search lists are called rich results or rich text summaries. This information can help your site attract more searchers’ attention in SERP, thereby increasing the click rate of your natural search results and bringing more free traffic.

Benefits of adding Schema tags to WordPress sites

Before we look at how to add Schema tags to a WordPress site, let’s take a look at its benefits. The main benefit is search engine optimization. By providing contextual data to search engines, your WordPress site is more likely to rank high in SERP. This means that the details required by search engines in 2020 are more likely to accurately reflect the true content of the site.

So, if you are running a personal website with your own blog, you can tell the search engine that your site represents a person and who that person is. With Schema tags, you can also link your site to your personal social media account.

On the other hand, if your site represents an organization, you need to tell the search engine some different information.

Search engine optimization based on location is also beneficial. You can use Schema tags to tell search engines where your site is, or where the organization it represents is. If people are looking for specific business types in your region, you will get higher search engine rankings.

In addition to search engine optimization, Schema tags also help with the Google knowledge panel. The knowledge panel is the information area displayed on the right side of the search results. They are related to search terms and provide a wealth of information forms from a variety of sources.

For example, if I search Matt Mullenweg, I will see a knowledge panel that tells me more about him.

If you add Schema tags to a WordPress site, Google will know whether your site represents an individual or an organization, as well as the type of content on the page. Google can use this information to populate the knowledge panel to ensure that it contains more (more accurate) information from different sources, such as social media accounts.

Schema tags also help enrich fragments and sitelinks. This means that your search engine list includes not only your home page, but also additional information, such as site content or a list of sub-pages within the site. The information provided by the Schema tag helps search engines extract this information and add it to the SERP. It turns out that these rich search results can improve the average click-through rate.

Schema tags can also help you link your site to your social media account. One of the microdata you can include in your site is links to various social media accounts, including Facebook and Twitter. This will help search engines combine these two sources of information when people search for information about you to provide them with the results they need.

Schema tag exampl

Now you know why you want to add Schema tags to WordPress sites. But before you do that, you need to know which tags can be added and which data types are supported.

There is a complete list of data types on schema.org, of which the most commonly used data types are as follows:

• Creative works: CreativeWork, Book, Movie, MusicRecording, Recipe, TVSeries etc.
• Embedded non-text objects: AudioObject, ImageObject, VideoObject.
• Event.
• Organization.
• Person.
• Place, LocalBusiness, Restaurant, and more.
• Product, Offer, AggregateOffer.
• Review, AggregateRating.
• HowTo
• Podcast.

This is only a small part of the available data types: there are dozens, even hundreds more. Google provides a convenient page that shows what features you can see in SERP after adding structured data to a web page.

And it’s growing. For example, schema version 6. 0 adds new data types, including additional properties for MediaGallery, SportsEvent, FloorPlan, and JobPosting.

Coronavirus-related events occurred at the end of 1919, and Schema.org now includes Schema for special announcements, Covid-19 testing facilities, etc.

Benefits of tagging podcasts with Schema tags

As more and more people rely on voice assistants such as Amazon Echo or Google Assistant, tagging your content is becoming more and more important. In fact, Google has now included audio sources in search results and is starting to give priority to audio formats in search results on Android devices, Google apps and Google’s home page, increasing the visibility of podcasts.

Use data types

Suppose your website represents a restaurant. To tell search engines this, you should use Schema tags, especially organization and restaurant data types, to add this information to your page.

In addition, you may need a location page and an upcoming event page for your restaurant, in which case you can use the activity data type to provide more relevant information to the search engine.

With such a simple example, you can see how multiple data types are associated with a particular site or page.

Later, you’ll see how to use plug-ins to add microdata provided by schema.org to various pages of the WordPress Web site.

First, let’s look at some examples of Schema tags in real-world applications.

Schema tag example: .com

The website is a good start.

If we search, the results include not only links to the site, but also other search terms that people use to find and some of the most frequently searched sub-pages on the site.

Search results

If you plug the website into Google’s structured data testing tool, you will find that our website contains more microdata.

The structured data of a page being tested

The results of the check data test tool show that the Schema tag data type is used, including

• @ type: Product.
• Publisher @ type: Organization.
• Publisher sameAs: .
• IsPartOf name: .

This is just a sample of microdata provided. You can find additional data in the Google structured data testing tool.

Schema tag example: Yoast.com

Let’s look at another example of a website using Schema tags. Many webmasters choose Yoast because their SEO plug-ins contain Schema tags.

If you search for Yoast on Google, you’ll see some sitelinks (just like that), but you’ll also see a knowledge panel that includes information about Yoast and its social media account.

Knowledge panel of Yoast

If you run Yoast sites through structured data testing tools, you will find that they use Schema tags to provide this information (as expected).

Testing structured data for Yoast

Schema tags are mainly used in organizations and technical organizations. This is because, historically, adding Schema tags to websites has not been easy. However, the owners of WordPress sites have an advantage that they can use plug-ins to add.

Let’s see how it works.

How to add Schema tags to WordPress sites

There are several ways to add schema.org tags. Let’s have a look together!

Google also provides an updated rich text summary (Rich Snippets) testing tool. It not only checks whether the structured data tags on your site have rich text summaries, but also shows whether some data is missing.

I hope this tutorial will help you solve the problem of structured data markup on WordPress sites. Structured data tags on the site are only part of SEO optimization. You need to know more about WordPress SEO optimization techniques. You can check out the site’s tutorial tips for more content.