What is Schema and How to Apply It to WordPress Websites?

As the owner of a website, optimizing the website content to make it easy for users to search your website is a very important thing. Schema is one of the tools that help you do this effectively. Do you believe that only by a few hours of research on Schema, you can apply and help your website improve SEO ranking significantly? Find out what Schema is and if it is necessary.

What is Schema?

Schema is a code snippet that sets the page's HTML to structure, organize, and display data (your website content) so that search engines can find and read them easily.

If your website has no Schema while it has abundant and messy information, search engines cannot filter out what information is essential. Once Schema is available, search engines can read and understand your website content more clearly. As such, it will understand this page like a product page, and what product type is, which manufacturer is, then may display that information on the search engine results page (SERP).

This information is called “rich snippet” or “featured snippet”. There are many “rich snippet” types for websites with different content. However, remember that Schema doesn't guarantee the display of the above information on SERPs. It only helps search engines easily find out that information.

Why Should You Use Schema?

For example, when the user searches with the “TheFour” keyword, the search engines will offer all options related to this keyword. Yet, TheFour is often associated with the word “theme”, so Google has prioritized display as the theme first. Because my GretaThemes website, which provides TheFour theme, has installed Schema, it is shown in the top position on SERPs.

As mentioned above, Schema structures and organizes the data so that search engines know the most essential information about your website. Thanks for giving more specific and accurate information to search engines, it will be easier for users to find your website, then increase traffic and rankings for your page.

In addition, the "rich snippet" mentioned in the previous section will help you to highlight the important information to make the website more attractive and look more credible.

Common Types of "Rich Snippet"

There are up to 50 types of Schema or “rich snippets” depending on your website content. I will list some of the most popular and outstanding types in this article.

Reviews

This Schema displays scores, votes of a product, and even the views and rankings if the product is a movie, music video, etc. A good score can enhance your website’s reputation. On the contrary case, you should be careful when you use it.

If you want to learn how to show this rating on SERPs, please read this tutorial.

Breadcrumbs

Breadcrumb or the navigation bar will be eye-catching and explicit in order to help visitors know where they are. Then, the bounce rate may be reduced. Notably, this form fits almost all websites.

Sitelink

This “rich snippet” will show and highlight important links on the main menu of the page. So the visitors will go to these pages more quickly and conveniently.

Knowledge Graph

This is a large card of the information displayed in the right hand when you search for keywords about certain individuals, organizations, products, etc. It provides more information such as date of birth, biography, address, and value of an organization or a person to increase reliability and authenticity.

 

How to Get Schema for Your Website?

Check to See if Your Website has Schema or not

Initially, you need to check if the website has Schema and if it is well structured.

First, go to the Google Structured Data Testing Tool of Google Search Console.

Then enter your website name in the Fetch URL section and click Run test. Wait a minute and enjoy a cup of tea.

The Detected section will show the structured data. If there is no data here, it means that your page hasn’t had Schema yet and you need to install it to your website. Otherwise, the more data is shown, the better your website is structured. For example, my website shows the Webpage, Organization, ImageObject, and CreativeWork sections, which means that it already had Schema.

Install a Schema Plugin

There are two common ways to add Schema to a website: installing plugins and manually adding code. If you are not a coder then you will find the second way complicated. So I recommend that you use the plugin for ease.

I wrote an article about the best Schema plugins here, take a look, and choose a suitable one for your site. In this article, I suggest using the Slim SEO Schema, the best schema plugin for WordPress!

It's also recommended to install Slim SEO as well as it provides basic schemas (WebPage, Organization, etc.) for your website without requiring any actions from you.

Slim SEO Schema is very easy to use. After installing it, go to Settings > Slim SEO and select the tab Schema. And then, follow its very detailed documentation to add and configure schemas.

Last Words

Now, you basically understand Schema and know how to install it. If you want to have a more advanced Schema (rich snippets), as I mentioned at the beginning of this article, you should use the premium version.

Hopefully, having a deep understanding of Schema and knowing how to apply it, your website will be optimized and improve rankings. Also, we have a lot of articles about website optimization and SEO, which you can visit and read on our blog!