In order for your website to rank high, you need to rank it in the search engines.
Structured data is often used for SEO measures, and there is “json-ld” as a format for that structured data.
It may seem difficult at first glance, but the mechanism itself is not very difficult.
This time, I will introduce what kind of knowledge “json-ld” is necessary for using structured data and how to use it.
What is json-ld?
Simply put, json-ld is a format (specification) for describing structured data.
There are several types of structured data formats, but json-ld is recommended by Google among them, so it can be said that it is the most commonly used format today.
What exactly is “structured data”?
In order to know json-ld, it is easier to understand what structured data is in the first place.
Structured data is “content written in HTML that is organized with tags so that search engines can easily understand it.”
Search engines are not human, so they cannot accurately understand the meaning and intent of sentences that are just written as text in content.
For example, let’s say you have the text “Taro Yamada, born August 10, 1990, office worker.”
- Taro Yamada ・・・ Personal name
- August 10, 1990・・・Date of birth
- Company employee… Occupation
If you see it, you can understand what each text means, such as the person’s name and date of birth, as shown above.
However, since search engines only read text as strings, it is difficult to accurately grasp the meaning of words and context.
Therefore, by using HTML to give meaning to characters and sentences, search engines can easily read the content and crawl the website smoothly.
Adding meaning to HTML in this way is called “structural markup.”
*Reference: Google Search Central
“json-ld” is a format for describing html meta information
Now that I have explained structured data, I will explain again what json-ld is.
As mentioned above, json-ld is a format for describing HTML meta information when describing structured data.
This format for structured data is collectively called “syntax”. Not only json-ld, but also the following formats are syntax.
- RDFa
- Microdata
json-ld is not only recommended by Google, but it has the advantage of being easy to write anywhere in HTML.
Therefore, when doing structured markup, it is common to write in the json-ld format.
“schema.org” is one way to describe structured data
json-ld is a format, but it cannot do structured markup by itself.
Another necessary element is a “vocabulary” as a standard for giving meaning to words and sentences.
There are several types of vocabularies, but the typical ones are as follows.
- org
- data-vocabulary.org
Among them, “schema.org” is recommended by Google, so it is common to use this. Basically, schema.org and json-ld do structured markup and you’re good to go.
For example, consider using schema.org/json-ld to do structured markup on “pasta”.
“@context”: “https://schema.org/”,
“@type”: “Recipe”,
“name”: “Pasta”,
By writing as above, “@type” tells the search engine that it is a “cooking topic” and “name” tells the search engine that “the name of the dish is pasta”.
In this way, various words that appear in the content have meanings such as “person’s name”, “place”, “company name”, “address”, “food”, etc., so that search engines can grasp the content more accurately and in detail. The purpose of structured markup is to
Read Also: What is meta information (meta tag)?
Description example of “schema.org” using “json-ld”
<script type=”application/ld+json”>
{
“@context”: “https://schema.org/”,
“@type”: “Recipe”,
“name”: “Party Coffee Cake”,
“author”: {
“@type”: “Person”,
“name”: “Mary Stone”
},
“datePublished”: “2018-03-10”,
“description”: “This coffee cake is awesome and perfect for parties.”,
“prepTime”: “PT20M”
}
</script>
* Quote: Google Search Central
Let’s take a look at an example of using json-ld to describe structured data on schema.org.
First, in the “<script type=”application/ld+json”>” part, specify that this structured data is written in json-ld format.
Next , in the “”@context”: “https://schema.org/”,” part, we indicate that the standard that gives the meaning is schema.org/ .
From the @type~ part after that, we give meaning to what the content is written about.
In the above example, the meaning is given with the following contents.
- “”@type”: “Recipe”,”・・・It is written about cooking
- “”name”: “Party Coffee Cake”,”・・・the name of the dish
- “”author”:”・・・The person who wrote this article
- “”@type”: “Person”,” “”name”: “Mary Stone””・・・Person name
By the way, you can type the code by hand, but it’s easier to use Google’s official ” Structured Data Markup Support Tool “.
If you paste the HTML or URL of your own website, it will automatically generate HTML for pasting after doing structural markup.
What is the SEO effect when using json-ld?
A certain SEO effect can be expected by using structured markup using json-ld.
Structural markup is easy to get a proper evaluation on SEO because it can convey the contents of the content to the search engine accurately and in detail by giving meaning to the characters and sentences.
Also, by adding structured markup such as breadcrumbs, FAQs, cooking ingredients and cooking time, rich results may be displayed in the search results.
When your website is ranked high and a rich result is displayed, it will appear in a larger space than usual on the search results page and stand out, which may improve your click-through rate.
Overall, it has a great SEO advantage that has a positive impact on user behavior, so it is recommended to firmly insert structured data with json-ld.
summary
This time, I introduced “json-ld”, an element that makes up structured data.
json-ld is a format for using structured data, and it is called “syntax” together with other formats.
When doing structured markup, not only json-ld but also a set of standards called “vocabulary” that gives meaning to words and sentences is required.
Google recommends “json-ld” for syntax and “schema.org” for vocabulary, so basically it is recommended to use these two for structured data.
By adding meaning with structured data, it becomes easier to be evaluated by search engines, and there are great advantages in terms of SEO measures, such as rich results being displayed in search results.
Adding structured data with json-ld is not very difficult, so please try it.