Unlock the Power of Structured Data for Your Website
Discoverability is Key
In today’s digital landscape, having a website is not enough. You need to ensure that it’s discoverable by search engines like Google, DuckDuckGo, and others. One way to achieve this is by adding structured data to your site, which helps search engines understand your content and showcase it to a wider audience.
What is Structured Data?
Structured data is a standardized format that allows you to explicitly declare the type of content on your page. This format is maintained by Schema.org, a collaborative project between search engine representatives. With hundreds of types of structured data available, you can choose the ones that best fit your content.
The Impact of Structured Data
Structured data can significantly enhance the way your content is displayed in search results. For instance, when searching for “best brownie recipe” on Google, you’ll notice a carousel featuring various brownie recipe links with images, titles, and descriptions. This carousel is generated by reading structured data from the websites in question.
A Practical Example: Adding Structured Data to a React App
Let’s create a simple React app and add structured data to it. We’ll use JSON-LD, a preferred format by Google, to provide structured data. By adding a JSON-LD script tag to our page, we can explicitly declare the type of content and provide additional information about our article.
Testing Our Structured Data
To validate our structured data, we can use Google’s Rich Results Test tool. By pasting our HTML code into the tool, we can see if our structured data meets the requirements for rich results.
Global Structured Data with Docusaurus
If you’re using Docusaurus, a React-based document/blog engine, you can render structured data on every screen of your site using the headTags API. This API allows you to perform tasks like rendering preload tags for fonts, meta tags, and structured data common to all pages.
Takeaway
By integrating structured data into your website, you can improve its discoverability and provide a better user experience. With the techniques demonstrated in this tutorial, you can enhance your website and facilitate more efficient interactions with users and search engines.