Adding Schema.org Structured Data to your website can improve how search engines understand your content as well as help you earn rich features in the SERPs.
Getting started with structured data can seem overwhelming. In this video, we are going to walk through Google’s Structured Data Markup Helper and a few other JSON-LD generators that you can use to get started with implementing schema.org to your site today.
Table of Contents
Resources:
Google’s Structured Data Markup Helper: https://www.google.com/webmasters/mar…
Steal Our JSON-LD: https://jsonld.com/
Simplified Search: https://simplifiedsearch.net/
- Learn more about Schema.org & Structured Data: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list…
- How to Use Schema.org to Create and Add Structured Data to Your Website: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xQeRA…
- Where To Put Schema Markup On Your Website: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uq9Fj…
Video Transcript:
Do you need to mark up your site with structured data, but you’re not sure where to start? In this episode of Hack My Growth, we’re going to be looking at Google Structured Data Markup tool and how we can leverage that tool to generate our JSON-LD for our site. We’re also going to take a look at a few other tools that help us take this technology even further. All right, let’s go.
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Using Google Structured Data Markup Helper
In this video, like I said in the opener, we’re going to be looking at how we can generate our JSON-LD code that we can copy and paste right into our website. Now, this can be a barrier of entry for a number of people who want to begin to add structured data to their website, but not really sure where to start or how to create JSON-LD. So we’re going to be looking at Google Structured Data Markup Helper, as well as a few other tools that we can leverage to make the implementation of JSON-LD structured data even easier.
Here we are at the home of Google’s Structured Data Markup Helper. As you can see here, we’ve got a couple of different ways we can approach this. We can either do it through our website, or we can actually do it through email where you can paste HTML. The email side here, obviously it’s a little bit more on reservations.
Generating Markup
Unless you’re doing that, you probably aren’t going to need this section. We’re going to mostly stay here in the website. What you can do is get help with generating a few different types of markup; articles, events, movies, restaurants, book reviews, and the like. As you can see, there are 12 different types that Google has right here. Now, there are a number of other types available to markup. There are tons of different ways to markup your site. But if you’re getting started, this is a really great place to start. What it’s going to do, it’s going to look at your website or your HTML and allow you to work through that and structure your data.
The first thing you’re going to need is a URL that you want to markup. We recently had this blog posted and let’s say I didn’t have Article Markup on it and I wanted to add it. I can copy the URL right in here and click Start Tagging. What it’s doing is it’s loading the page into the Markup Helper, and it’s going to allow you to use a visual editor to create your markup, which makes it extremely easy, especially to someone who’s new to structured data. Now over here is the required items. There are a lot more items that you can add that can be very helpful when it comes to adding structured data, but these are the basics of things that you should be adding in here.
The main one, the name, as you can see here, is required. All you need to do with this tool is highlight the section and then tag it. So this would be the title. And then we would find the author here and then we’d find the publish date. Now you could either set your own date/time selector, or you can just let Google do it themselves, which is what I recommend, especially if you’re getting started. Then for your image, you just click there and select Image. Now you can do either an article section, like a section of it, or the body. You can paste all the body of this in here if you want as well and add this as the article body.
For the URL, you can’t go up here and grab this and you can’t go back to this page necessarily, it’s not going to import it in here. You might need to add missing tags, and that’s what this button is for. Hit Add Missing Tags, and you can select the one that’s missing.
Let’s say the URL is missing, we can paste that in. Let’s say the publisher is missing, which is our website. Let’s say you wanted to add a review, you could do that in here. You could say, the best, the worst in the account. You can add an aggregate review if you want to. Add what you can. Obviously, you don’t have all the different options. This is going to give you the basic option.
Accessing JSON-LD
Once you’re done tagging, you select Create HTML. What Google’s done is they’ve spit this out now as JSON-LD. You can either download this file, you can change it and maybe you want it to be in micro data. I definitely recommend using JSON-LD. You can click Finish, and it will give you a few other options here like, “Hey, you can learn more about documentation here or we can test it.” This is going to open up a tool that is going out, which is their structured data testing tool. We can go ahead and take this code here and publish it here in the code snippet and run the test. As you can see here, we have some warnings, things here that Google wants you to add into your structured data now that we don’t see. There will be some other things that we’d have to do if we were just relying on the Google Structured Data Markup Tool.
Using the Rich Results Test
Now, what we can also do is try the new Rich Results Test. Once again, we’re going to use our code here and we’re going to test it. This tool is doing something very similar to the Structure Data Tool. When you look at this, we’re actually not getting warnings at all. That’s because the tools are slightly different, which means that this page technically is eligible for earning a rich result when it comes to the article markup. Even though the structure data tool here says, “Hey, you need to have a logo and you need to have a headline, you should probably put date modified, you should probably put the main entity of the page.” There’s a lot more that can be added, but as far as the rich results go, you can earn that. Now this is a tool, as you can see just by the style and look of it. It’s a little bit older. It doesn’t have all the different types of markup that you can create. It’s meant to help you get started.
Try Steal Our JSON
What if you want to go a little bit deeper, you want to make sure that you do cover all of your bases? Well, there’s a number of structured data tools out there that can help you build this if you don’t want to do it manually. One great tool is called Steal Our JSON. It’s jsonld.com. And what they do is they give you a great template to start with right here. With these, you could copy this and then change out your headline, your alternative headlines, add the image. You can add a number of their things here. Look, they’ve got award, editor, the genre, the keywords, the word count. You can add a ton of markup right here using this blog post one or the article’s schema, which we looked at.
Using Article Schema
An article schema, we’ve got the organization added in. They’ve got a number of different schema types here that you can work through everything from articles and blog posts, to books, to training courses, all the way down through here, where you can even do things like speakable, which will be markup for personal assistants like Google or Alexa or Siri. This is a really great resource if you’re getting started as well, to copy and paste the code and change it out with the appropriate fields for your site or your piece of content.
Our New Tool
Another thing that I wanted to share with you is a tool that we have been building. We’re in the process of finishing up our course, and one of the tools that we’re going to give people who take our course, that use our course is this generator as well. Very similar to what we did before with the Google Markup Tool over here, we’ve got a form that you can fill out. I can come over here and I could hit the headline, right?
Here’s the headline of my article. Go ahead and paste it here. I’ll take the URL of that article, paste it right here. I can take the image of the article. And if you ever have an image, you can right-click it and copy image address because you’re going to need the actual address. Short description of the article. You could take the first paragraph or create your own unique description that really summarizes it well. We can add the author type for a person, publisher date, the publisher logo, when it was published, when it was modified all those extra elements in here. And we’re going to continue to be expanding these tools in order to allow users to easily create their markup and put it in on their site and as well. Once we put the author in here, I’ll show you and we’ll validate it.
Now our script is done. We can click these buttons up here. We can validate this code and this will open up your Structured Data Testing Tool. We’ll run through here. No warnings. It looks exactly like it should. We can also run it in the Rich Results Test. Test this code as well. Now you can see that we have everything that we need to have. Everything’s good. We don’t have any warnings and it was pretty easy to do. All we have to do now is take this code over here. We could copy it and then put it right here into the header of the site or even in the body of the site and that structure data now is going to be implemented on this article. So if you’re doing pages one by one, this tool is going to be very helpful I believe for a number of people. Right now, we’ve got Article and Breadcrumbs, Events, FAQs, Job Posting, Local Organization, Person, Product, Recipe, Video, and Website. We’re currently working on a number of other entity types or a number of other structured data types that we’re going to be adding in as time goes on just to make life easier for our team, as well as anybody who is going to be part of our community and leveraging our tools and resources.
Sign Up for the Course
If you’re interested to learn more about the course, you can just go to simplifiedsearch.net and sign up today. We’re going to be releasing some of the first videos in the next week or so, we’re wrapping up some editing. By signing up today, you’re not only going to get a free ebook, which is going to walk you through how to do structured data, what JSON-LD is and how you can implement it, we’re going to give you access to our Structured Data Generator. That way you can start using it and testing it out and seeing whether or not you like it and to see if you can get some value out of it.
If you have any questions on using either Google Structured Data Markup Tool, any of the other tools out there, please comment below. If you’ve got another tool that you like that we didn’t mention in this video, please comment below. We’d love to see that tool as well, and continue to build this community around users who want to use structured data to increase the visibility of their website. Thanks again for watching and until next time, Happy Marketing.
