Introduction
Overview
One of the ways you can improve the appearance of your site in Google search results is by using rich snippets in your posts and pages.
Rich snippets are a way to show the Google crawler additional data that it can display in the search results to make your site more appealing to click on.
For example, here’s a Google result for a post to which we added rich snippets:
This is already a popular post so we figured we’d double down and help it stand out even more in search results.
As you can see, rich snippets convey some kind of information about the search result, whether it’s a rating, a ranking, or any number of other types of available rich snippets. Supposedly, they also help your search results.
My goal with this article is to help you setup a rich snippet plugin for your WordPress site and show you how you can test it and make sure the snippets will be correctly parsed by the Google crawler.
In this first of several related tutorials, I will guide you through setting up your rich snippet plugin and testing the structured data to make sure it’s doing its job.
The Schema Plugin
There are many ways you can setup rich snippets.
For this article I will be using the free version of the Schema plugin— a “Super fast, light-weight plugin for adding schema.org structured data markup in recommended JSON-LD format automatically to WordPress sites“.
Let’s start with installing the plugin and setting it up.
Setting up the Schema plugin
Installing the plugin
From the left Plugin menu, click on the Add New button and use the right search field to type Schema. Click Install Now and after the plugin is installed click Activate.
On the left side a new menu named Schema will appear, click on it so you can open the plugin Settings
The Schema plugin has a very nice wizard we can use for configuration, let’s use and start setting up everything
Let’s select the type your site has
The next step is selecting if your site represents a person or an organization, adding the organization or person’s name and adding a logo or a personal image.
Let’s add some social media links too
If your site has an About page and a Contact page make sure to select them here. Add a logo or a personal image here too, following the logo guidelines.
That’s it! You have a working rich snippets plugin and now it’s time to test if everything works fine.
Testing rich snippets
To make sure everything works correctly we are going to use a Google Chrome extension and check if the rich snippets data is working fine.
The name of the extension is Structured Data Testing Tool and can be downloaded from here.
Installing the extension
Click on the Add to Chrome button and then click Add extension
The extension will be installed and a button will appear at the top, clicking that button will show you result for any page you visit
Testing the data using the extension
Let’s test this with a post from your site, open any page from your site and the click on the extension button
Hmmm, it seems we have some errors, let’s check them in detail. Click on the schema type, BlogPosting.
And now click again on the schema type, BlogPosting
You can see from the screenshot above that the url and the image properties are not set up properly.
In the next part of this series, we’ll fix these errors and make sure the rich snippets are working correctly, stay tuned!
