Technical SEO: How to add structured data to your website
Structured data is a way to normalize your data and Google uses it to understand better what your website and specific pages are about. This is where you can help Google by providing this kind of information on your website. In turn, Google can use this to improve the appearance of your website in the search results. If you've ever seen an FAQ, company details, and news articles in your search results, then you've seen what structured data can do for your website.
In this post, we'll go over a few common structured data types that you can add to your website today. Structured data might sound like something that's complicated, but all it is is a JSON object in your HTML content. These are the structured data types we'll go over in this post:
- Article
- Breadcrumb
- FAQ
- Logo
- Sitelinks searchbox
These are types that you can add to a blog, but you can pick and choose which one applies to your situation. You can find the full list of available data types on Google Developers. They may be worth checking out if your needs differ from what I'm describing in this post.
Where do I place the structured data?
Structured data is a script with a type, it's not content that will be displayed on the page. This means you can place this code snippet really anywhere in your HTML file. It's easier to maintain if everything is grouped together at the bottom of the page. I'm using blocks and components for this website, so I always place the related structured data inside of that component. This could mean that the structured data for the breadcrumbs is all the way at the top of your page and the rest of your code snippets at the bottom of the page.
Article
An article can be an actual article, but also a blog post. First, let's show the structured data for the previous blog post that I posted on this website. This will give you a good look at what this structured data looks like: