SEO: Structured Data & Schema Markup for Webmasters

There are different ways you can add structured data to a website.  In this video, I'll tell you what the options are.  In this course, we are only going to cover one way.  It's the way that Google recommends we go about adding structured data, and will work for all search engines.

We will be using Schema.org as our taxonomy of schema because this site is the one that was created and endorsed by the top search engines.  This video explores the site, what to expect on the site, and the hierarchical nature of "things".

We will be creating the markup to be included in our web pages using JSON-LD, so this lecture looks a little more closely at the structure and syntax of this programming language.

Google wants you to use structured data responsibly and any attempt to abuse the system will be met with a manual penalty.  This video shows you where you can go to get specific guidelines when creating structured data for your web pages.

Before we start, you might like to bookmark the URLs of the tools you'll be using a lot.  To make this easier, I've created a file for you.

Before you start adding structured data to your website, do you want to check if some already exists?

In this video we will take a piece of content on my own site and decide what type of content it is.  To help us choose, I always recommend looking at the options on Schema.org, but then use Google's guidelines and markup helper to decide.

This video takes a look at Google's structured data markup helper tool to markup an article.

Google's markup helper does not have a definitive list of types, so often, you might need to grab some example code and edit it (or use a different tool).  This video looks at the manual process.

In this video we'll create the structured data for an Organization using one of the free tools available.

Let's use the a JSON-LS generator to create the markup for a product.

In this example we create the structured data for an event.  This is a little different because we often need to add "tour dates" so that the rich snippet shows multiple events.

Google has added some schema  support for courses.  However, a lot of the schema on the schema.org website is still pending, so has not been fully accepted by Google.  This video explains the situation and what you can do now.

This example takes a look at the schema available for your Local Business

In this example, we look at the schema for a review, and modify some code from the schema website to better suite our needs.

This example looks at the markup for a software application.

This example looks at the markup for adding breadcrumbs to your rich snippet.

This example shows how to add the markup for a sitelinks searchbox directly in your rich snippet.

This video looks at the ways you can get structured data into your web pages.

This is just the briefest of introductions to Google Tag Manager.

This video walks you through creating an account in Google Tag Manager.

In this video we'll look at the ways in which you can insert the Tag manager code into the pages on your website.

Tag manager works by a system of tags and triggers.   This video explains how that system works in relation to our JSON-LD structured data.

In this video, we'll add some structured data to a tag, set the trigger and test that it all works OK.

The previous video added structured data to all pages on the website.  What if you only want it appearing on certain pages?  That's easy enough with triggers.

In this video we will briefly introduce the idea of variables inside our tags so that the same tag can be used across multiple pages.

This video introduces the best Schema plugin I have found.  It is the one I personally use, so I'll show you the initial setup.  In the next couple of videos we'll look at creating schema with the plugin.

In this video we'll add Article schema and apply it to all posts on the website. 

This video shows you how to use the Schema Pro plugin to assign schema to specific sections, posts, or pages, of your website.

Let me show you a few more examples of Schema set up with the Schema Pro plugin.  I'll use a couple of my other websites to illustrate the important points.

Google search console can show us information about the structured data on our website, including any errors that need fixing.  This lecture introduces that.

Google's Data Highlighting tool is not recommended as the structured data produced by this tool is only visible to Google.  However, this video shows you how the tool works.

A guide to using Schema.

This document provides a list of the resources used in this course.