What and why schema.org

What is schema.org?

Schema.org is a collaborative, community activity with a mission to create, maintain, and promote schemas for structured data on the Internet, on web pages, in email messages, and beyond.

Structured data can be used to mark up all kinds of items from products to events to recipes.

Most sites and organizations will not have a reason to extend schema.org. However, schema.org offers the ability to specify additional properties or sub-types to existing types.

"Schema.org" vocabulary can be used with many different encodings, including RDFa, Microdata and JSON-LD. These vocabularies cover entities, relationships between entities and actions, and can easily be extended through a well-documented extension model. Over 10 million sites use Schema.org to markup their web pages and email messages. Many applications from Google, Microsoft, Pinterest, Yandex and others already use these vocabularies to power rich, extensible experiences.

Why use schema.org

As with any site nowadays; you’re competing in a crowded market-place. Ranking higher on search result pages or being included in 3rd party registries that receive more web-traffic can raise the exposure of your work to be seen by larger audiences. This is all achievable by following best practices and applying schema.org to your site.

Communicate with all the search engine
Enhance findability from search engine results
Provide context to an ambigous webpage
Metadata Interoperability and Standardization across all website using schema.org

Schema.org formats

You can use the schema.org vocabulary along with Microdata, RDFa, or JSON-LD format to add markup to your web pages.

Format exemples:

Microdata

<div itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/SportsTeam">
  <span itemprop="name">San Francisco 49ers</span>
  <div itemprop="member" itemscope
        itemtype="http://schema.org/OrganizationRole">
    <div itemprop="member" itemscope
            itemtype="http://schema.org/Person">
      <span itemprop="name">Joe Montana</span>
    </div>
    <span itemprop="startDate">1979</span>
    <span itemprop="endDate">1992</span>
    <span itemprop="roleName">Quarterback</span>
</div>

RDFa

<div vocab="http://schema.org/" typeof="SportsTeam">
  <span property="name">San Francisco 49ers</span>
  <div property="member" typeof="OrganizationRole">
    <div property="member" typeof="http://schema.org/Person">
      <span property="name">Joe Montana</span>
    </div>
    <span property="startDate">1979</span>
    <span property="endDate">1992</span>
    <span property="roleName">Quarterback</span>
</div>

JSON-LD

<script type="application/ld+json">
{
  "@context": "http://schema.org",
  "@type": "SportsTeam",
  "name": "San Francisco 49ers",
  "member": {
    "@type": "OrganizationRole",
    "member": {
      "@type": "Person",
      "name": "Joe Montana"
    },
    "startDate": "1979",
    "endDate": "1992",
    "roleName": "Quarterback"
  }
}
</script>

Examples

By performing a simple search of cupcake recipes on Google we will have as a result a preview of the information shown on the website even before going to the actual website; information such as the recipe name, rating, cooking time, calories and a description

Displayed on the website you can find the same rating details shown on the Google card.

And behind the scenes this metadata, used by Google on its search result cards, its marked schema.org

The type used on the markup itemprop="aggregateRating" is referencing the property on https://schema.org/Recipe website