Schema.org Structured Data
Beginning with Weaver Xtreme Version 3.2, Schema.org structured data (also called microformats) is now supported. Support for Schema.org has become an important part of every website to enhance SEO. While there are some WP plugins that add limited Schema.org support, it is impossible for a plugin to have the knowledge of the actual structure of the HTML generated by a theme. Thus, to get this important support, it must be an integrated part of the theme.
The following quotation is directly from the front page of Schema.org, and explains a bit what it is.
“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.
Schema.org vocabulary can be used with many different encodings, including RDFa, Microdata and JSON-LD. These vocabularies cover entities, relationships between entities and actions, and can easily be extended through a well-documented extension model. Over 10 million sites use Schema.org to markup their web pages and email messages. Many applications from Google, Microsoft, Pinterest, Yandex and others already use these vocabularies to power rich, extensible experiences.
Founded by Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and Yandex, Schema.org vocabularies are developed by an open community process…”
Inclusion of Schema.org structured data tags by Weaver Xtreme is totally automatic, and based on the content of pages or posts. Pages and posts are treated differently, and the proper tagsfor each type of page or blog is generated. Support for generating the proper post tags has also been added to the Page with Posts template, and the Weaver Show Posts plugin.
The Schema.org structured data specification allows a very large amount of flexibility in exactly which tags are used to describe a web page’s structure. There is no standard available for WordPress sites. Using some other themes, and following our own interpretation of how structured date should be applied to web pages, the following is a general outline Weaver Xtreme how implements structured data itemtypes.
- For all pages, excluding of search results, the topmost global structure is http://schema.org/WebPage placed on the <body>. Search results are structured as http://schema.org/SearchResultsPage instead.
- Pages, including archive like pages such as category or tag listings, are structured as http://schema.org/WebPageElement.
- Posts are structured with http://schema.org/Blog and http://schema.org/BlogPosting, including standard Blog Pages, Page with Posts, and posts displayed using the Weaver Show Posts plugin. Posts and pages are displayed as http://schema.org/Article on search pages. Posts also include publishing and author information when it is available.
- Featured Images are structured with http://schema.org/ImageObject, while other images are not structured.
- Other content areas structured include:
- the header – http://schema.org/WPHeader
- menus – http://schema.org/SiteNavigationElement
- widget areas – http://schema.org/WPSideBar
- footer – http://schema.org/WPFooter
- Post authors are structured with http://schema.org/Person and http://schema.org/Organization.
In addition to the above itemtypes, Weaver Xtreme also uses the following itemprop tags as approrpriate: mainContentOfPage, mainEntityOfPage, blogPost, dateModified, datePublished, author, name, publisher, logo, image, url.
A very technical description of the itemtypes and itemprops used above can be found on the Schema.org website.
You can see how Google interprets your pages with the structured data tagging at:
https://search.google.com/structured-data/testing-tool
IMPORTANT NOTE!
If you test your site with the Google structured data test, you will often (usually?) see at least some of the tags shown as having errors. These will usually be for a blog post image and a publisher’s logo, but sometimes other things. The error may say “A value for the image (or other thing) field is required.” This, in fact, is not quite true. Ideally all these tags are desired, but if the data is not supplied by the web author, they can’t be displayed, and it won’t matter if they are not present.
The logo field will be present only if you define a site logo in the Site Identity option. And because of some current issue with the Google test, even if you do supply a logo, there is a warning that the url is invalid. This does not affect the validity of the data, however.
A post image is not included in the structured data if you have not specified a Featured Image for the post. It would be too unreliable to try to guess an image using other images that might be included in a post.
It is also possible that other missing properties will be flagged, but this only happens if the site does not include that information (e.g., if you hide a post’s author from the meta info line). We decided to allow these ideally present properties rather than trying to guess at content. Having the overall structured data is much more important, and a few “missing” properties will not affect the overall benefits.