Structured data

Structured data for the web is something I did not have much of a grasp of until earlier this year. It came on to my radar during a discussion with some SEO experts regarding my employer’s website. After learning about about the benefits structured data can have for SEO, which has an obvious business benefit, I looked into the subject a bit deeper.

That led me to the website Schema.org, which is an incredible collaboration project to have a shared vocabulary for structured data in the form of types. Though many of the developers working on this project are from large search engine companies, the project itself is open community and follows guidelines from the W3C. The website provides guidelines, definitions, and a validator to test the output.

This led me to add various types on both my employer’s website as well as my personal website here using JSON-LD. In both instances, it was important for me to set up a programmatic way to implement schema on the various pages. Though you can simply add a script tag in your HTML and inject the structured data, that approach is not particularly scalable for larger websites. Though I needed to use some different tools to accomplish this, because my personal website uses the JavaScript web framework Astro and my employer website uses WordPress, the same general idea of using reusable templates applied.

I am curious to see how adding structured data improves the discoverability of both of these websites. Obviously my work would benefit from a broader reach in SEO but I always enjoy testing new technologies on my personal website and building out my portfolio of skills.