What is Structured Data in SEO ? How to add Structured Data to your Website?

You might have often heard these terms, Structured Data, JSON-LD, Schema.org…you might also have heard that … adding structured data to your website could increase the chances of improving ranking in Google. But Wait!!, What these terms actually are ??, and How adding Structured Data to your website may help you in SEO?.
Via this Article, we gonna explain everything about Structured DATA.

What is Structured Data?

Structured Data also called schema markup, is a code which is written in such a way that it helps search engine to crawl, organize, and display your content in search results in a specific and much richer way. This code can be easily put into your Website.
(Also Please note: Google does not always create a rich snippet of your page, even if you’ve added the structured data. There are no guarantees. So all you can do is add it to your page, and hope Google will pick it up!)

Let us give you an example of this, imagine you are having a site containing lots of recipes, now adding structured data to your website will help Google to show your website data in its search result richer and for this reason, these type of search results are called Rich Snippets.
structured data example

As you can see in the above example beside, URL and title, whole recipe with image is shown in the Search result also as you can see in 2nd highlighted example along with the recipe, time taken for the recipe, total calories and reviews are also shown. See how much easier these type of search results become for users to understand…

Therefore Structured data is a way to provide all the information to the search engine, like in above example, You can tell the search engines which ingredients there are in your recipe, you can tell them how long the preparation time is, and you can tell them how many calories the dish will contain. Google will be able to grasp all that information instantly and can decide to show it in the search results.

BTW, Google Structured Data is not meant for Recipes results only, but it also supports many other Categories. Checkout Google’s Search Gallery to see which rich results are powered by structured data.

Also There are other forms of structured data as well. For instance Open Graph (used by Facebook) and Twitter cards (used by Twitter).

What is Schema.org

Schema.org is a collaborative community activity with a mission to “create, maintain, and promote schemas for structured data on the Internet, on web pages, in email messages, and beyond.” Major players behind this combined effort are Bing, Google, Yahoo!, and Yandex. On Schema.org you can find all the structured data markup supported by the search engines. With the help of which you can create correct Markup for Structured Data for a particular page.

What is JSON-LD?

Well JSON-LD is just another way to write code or you can say it is one of the Markup for Schema.org, other markups are Microdata, RDFa. You can use any one of the Markup for the Structured Data, its your choice.

Why is structured data important for SEO?

Structured data are important for SEO as it makes easier for Google to understand the content of your website. By using Structured data, you can tell what your page is all about. Not only it helps Google to understand your website’s content, but also change the way your snippet (your search results) will look like. It’ll show more information to your customer. More specific information. And this will increase the likelihood a customer will click on your results, which in turn help you to gain rankings.

How to use structured data?

Well if you are using WordPress, then there is good news, You can simply use SEO by Yoast plugin. It will build a full structured data graph for every post or page on your site!. All you have to do is install the Plugin, complete the Wizard at Startup and its done. 🙂
You can also test Structured data created by this plugin on Google Structured data testing tool

For non-Wordpress People, worry not — you can use Google’s Structured Data Markup Helper tool to create the Structured Data.
google structured data markup helper

Just choose, your page’s category and enter the url, after few moment new page will open, just highlight all data required and choose valid tags for the required data and then click on create html

After Creating Structured Data in any desired format, copy the code and put it before section of your page and its done.

You can check and test Structured data created by this plugin on Google Structured data testing tool.

What is Structured Data in SEO ? How to add Structured Data to your Website?
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