Schema Markup is a great way to help push your website and content online. Schema markup provides core details to search engines. But it can be time consuming to write, and you can face lots of errors along the way. One of the best free tools out there is the Schema Markup Generator (JSON-LD) by Merkel.
With this easy to use generator, you can create several variations of schema markup and test them in the Google Structured Data Testing Tool.
Positives
- Multiple markups to choose from
- Simple user interface
- Quick testing
- Copy your markup with a click of a button
Negatives
- Basic markup, only includes default markup types
- Language option does not change all fields to match that location
- Blank fields are not removed from the markup
- Sometimes Google’s testing tool shows errors, even if every field is filled in
What schema markup can you generate?
Merkle are updating their generator all the time, as of April 9th 2020, there are the following;
- Article
- Breadcrumb
- Event
- FAQ Page
- How-to
- Job Posting
- Local Business
- Organisation
- Person
- Product
- Recipe
- Video
- Website
How does it work?
Lets take an example of a very popular markup, called FAQ Page. This markup can help show faqs on the search results page.
You have an FAQ page on your website, and want to add schema markup to it. For this example, we can use this question and answer;
Question: What is a group of Kangaroos called?
Answer: A group of Kangaroos is called a mob.
This now generated your markup on the right side. From here, click on the orange ‘G’ and select the Structured Data Testing Tool.
Unexpected benefits of Schema
- For search engines: The biggest purpose for the 4 giants to collaborate and develop the schema is to help them better understand, categorize topics and support content ranking of billions of websites today.
- For Website: When implementing the schema properly, your website will be easily categorized by bugs (Googlebot ...) to classify and collect your website's content. In addition, the schema will make it easier to rank your keyword set.
- Helping results show prominently (Rich Snippets): It will be very impressive if in the search results, your website is displayed prominently and "occupies more display area" than the rest thanks to rich snippets like : Photos , star reviews, breadcrumbs, Q&A, events, products, music ... from which the ability to click on the result (CTR) will be very high.
Most of the time, when implementing schema, you only have a single purpose to "beautify search results" . These are extremely common mistakes when it comes to schema implementation. This will affect extremely serious to the brothers SEO campaign in the long run, more dangerous is the website will stick manual action , come on! Let's take a look at it together, right?
- When creating and validating Entity : Do not know where Schema Local Business and Schema Person are attached, even attaching all URLs of the website
- Rating Schema: Fake bulk virtual reviews and unrated users
- Product Schema: Missing a few schema product fields and thought it was an error and proceeding to use the code to delete the product schema
- Schema asked: Self-generated questions and self-answers, users cannot interact In this part, "my point of view is not correct", I corrected, there are currently 2 types of FAQPage and QAPage, depending on each type, there are different deployment methods and applications, you should read more documentation from Google.
- Event Schema and Recipes: Create them yourself to beautify the displayed results while the website type and content have nothing to do with them.
Stop and check the schema now, to see if you've been spamming the schema or not with a very simple rule of thumb. Schema is structured data generated from content that is " visible " and " interactive " to your website for users.
Simple example: When creating Schema Person on a URL, you must make sure that URL shows information of that Person. Or the question and answer schema or schema review (5-star rating), you must ensure that the website content must have a star rating and it is important that the user is rated and decided by 1 star or 5. stars . Very simple, right!
