Improving WordPress SEO by adjusting and creating schema through SmartCrawl

Search engine optimization practices have become very important at the present time, because they allow your site to reach thousands of readers around the world for free, of course through search engines. In our current era, it is not possible to manage a website and reach the stages of financial and moral success without paying attention to search engines. .

Perhaps most website owners give great attention to improving the search engines on their sites, by creating exclusive content, using suitable templates , or increasing the speed of the site , but a large number of website owners neglect to pay attention to Schema or do not even know what it is.

Therefore, in this article, we will go on a journey to learn about Schema, its importance, and its significant impact on the performance of search engines (SEO), in addition to touching on a very important point, which is the use of the Schema Types Builder feature within the specialized SmartCrawl add-on. 

Read also : Improving SEO for WordPress blogs in 13 practical steps to advance in search results

What is meant by Schemas?

The process of archiving websites is known to be easy in theory, as it – in short – depends on the access of search engine spiders, which are specialized automated software, to the pages of your site in order to archive them and show them later in the search results.

As we know, it takes time for your site to be analyzed by the search engine and then given the appropriate ranking among other sites that publish similar content. Although the process is complex from the programming side, it happens very quickly, as the spider enters your site and reads – Theoretically – he understands the content of your site, and then tries to present it to interested readers.

This process is known as (crawling) in , which is a good name given that these programs are referred to as spiders. As you know, this process does not involve human intervention, which sometimes leads to spiders not understanding the content of your site in the first place, or getting confused.

So, sometimes a spider comes into your site, looks at the content, and then doesn’t understand it! This may cause your site’s ranking to suffer, or not to be archived properly. To solve this problem, skima appeared.

The English word (Schema) is translated as its counterpart in (Schema). Aside from the linguistic aspect, Schema is a direct way by which your site can tell search engine spiders – during the crawling process – what your site is, explicitly and clearly.

These diagrams can also be used in other places, such as emails, which is understandable since they are fully communicative and illustrative, so it is natural for them to be used in other places. Schemas are developed and curated by a collaborative project known as Schema.org, which aims to improve structured data everywhere, including your site’s pages.

Read also: The complete guide to choosing keywords for SEO

The importance of Schema

As previously mentioned, these schemes help search engine spiders in particular and search engines in general to understand and classify the content of pages on the Internet, which leads to improving the quality and experience of use in general, whether for the users themselves or the search engines.

Schema.org is also funded and supported by the leading companies in the field of search engines, which are Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, and the Russian Yandex. Therefore, if your site depends on search engines, even if incompletely, paying attention to SEO is essential.

The impact of schema charts on SEO performance

For a long time, Schema did not directly affect the performance of search engines, but now it plays a major role as one of the most important types of Structured Data in use today.

Skima also plays a major role in showing certain search results within Google, and you have probably seen different search results before, including search results related to parties and events, food recipes, or even articles that include reviews of products or services.

As you can infer, the site’s pages appear in this way in the search results when you use Skima. The previous image, for example, represents a site that uses the Skima chart for products and their ratings. 

Search results that rely on Skima charts are known as Rich Snippets and are constantly evolving. You may have noticed that the way search results are displayed on Google has changed in the past months or years.

In order for your site’s search results to appear in this way, or to use Skima charts in general, you must follow a number of steps, which can be described as a guide to using Skima, and they are as follows:

1. Skima must be officially included on your site
2. You must use the appropriate architecture for your site content or page content precisely
3. JSON-LD and RDFa microdata formats can be used as formats
4. The same rules should apply to all pages related to the home page
5. The page should, intuitively, allow Google to archive it by not having any code in the custom robots.txt file that prevents this.

Learn more: How to prevent or de-index your site in search results

Types of skima charts

During the previous part of this article, we learned about Skima charts, and we learned that they are descriptive data for the site’s content that allows search engines to understand the quality of the page more accurately, and we also learned that this helps improve the appearance of results in search engines.

We also referred to the use of the appropriate schema, which raises the logical question: What is the appropriate schema? What types of skima are basically available?

Here we have good news, which is that there are very many of these types, and they can be viewed directly through the official Skima website , and after that you can view the Skima that is officially supported by Google , given that it has revealed an example of this: 

Regarding how to check the schema – after adding it – and find out whether it was added correctly or not, Google provides a tool that allows this, which is the Structured Data Testing Tool , through which you can check the schema on any web page and obtain a report of any existing problems.

So far, we have talked about many things, but we have not yet talked about the relationship between WordPress and Skima on the one hand, or how to add Skima on the other hand.

An article that may interest you: Explaining Sitelinks and how to show them on search results pages

Schema types supported by WordPress

Schema support is built into WordPress through custom code, which resides within default WordPress themes, such as Twenty Twenty-One.

Most WordPress templates already include support for this feature, based on a mini-format known as hAtom, which is one of the formats in which code is written. Usually, all WordPress templates, especially high-performance ones, come with support for Schema, whether based on hAtom or others.

Using Schema within WordPress

Schemas are generally embedded within web pages in the form of code, that is, codes, so the user is always able to control the schema manually if he has the programming experience to do so.

You can go to the Schema.org website and obtain the appropriate schema and use it within your WordPress template. Let us now look at the code for adding schema related to an event or occasion, to provide an example:

1- SmartCrawl plugin for WordPress

As you can expect from the WordPress platform, there are a number of plugins that allow adding, inspecting, and controlling schema quickly and simply, and the most prominent of these plugins is the SmartCrawl plugin , which we referred to at the beginning of the article.

This add-on provides an excellent user experience in terms of improving the performance of search engines (SEO) and improving the site’s ranking in Google results and other engines, in addition to other tools expected from a search engine optimization add-on.

Below we summarize the most important features of the addition:

• Easy to set up the add-on for the first time
• Provide reports on the search engine performance of your site
• Ability to edit title and metadata
• Improve your site’s performance with social media
• Create site maps
• Page analysis
• Improving spider crawling performance and speed
• The feature of adding schema to pages
• The feature of creating custom skins
• Integration with other SEO tools

Therefore, we are able to describe the SmartCrawl add-on as an integrated add-on for improving search engine performance, but in addition to that, it provides very powerful performance in terms of adjusting the layout within pages, or adding new layouts other than those supported by default.

2- Control the Skima via SmartCrawl

So, the SmartCrawl add-on can be classified as one of the add-ons that adjust the performance of search engines on your site, in addition to the features of Skima, which are distinguished by its ability to deal with it.

Indeed, the add-on includes huge numbers of pre-made layouts that you can add to your site’s content in a very simple way, through the Schema Wizard feature, which allows you to add different layouts to your articles and pages.

When you add the schema to any page on your site, you can go to Google’s dedicated Rich Results Test tool to examine the pages and indicate whether the schema is correct or not, if you want to be sure.

The SmartCrawl add-on differs in that it accomplishes the task automatically without the need for additional steps. On the other hand, it depends on the JSON-LD data quality that was mentioned previously, and the skima is added via the addition within the (Head) tag on the page.

The available skins within the add-on vary, including skins dedicated to articles, public pages, events, frequently asked questions, products, and others. As part of the latest updates to the add-on, it began including a new number of skins.

Things become more professional with the Types Builder tool within the SmartCrawl add-on, which allows you to customize the types of layouts further, and through it you can choose a specific layout and then edit it, from among the following layouts:

• Article
• Event
• FAQ Page
• How To
• Local Business
• Product
• WooCommerce Product
• Recipe schema
• Job Posting schema
• Movie schema
• Course schema
• Books schema
• Software Application schema

Use SmartCrawl add-on

Our journey with this distinctive add-on begins with downloading and installing it. You can do this by logging in to your WordPress control panel, by adding wp-admin after the site link or through the method used by you.

Then we follow the following steps:

1. Head to the add-ons section
2. Go to the Add New option
3. Search for the extension by typing its name
4. Install it and then activate it (because add-ons do not activate automatically)

After installing the add-on, you can notice that an alert appears showing you that you are already using another add-on to improve the performance of search engines (SEO) and whether you would like to import its settings or not.

Here you can choose the option that suits you, but remember that the SmartCrawl add-on is an integrated SEO add-on, but if you will use it for Skima only, you may not need to import/copy the settings of other SEO add-ons.

Now, from the side menu in the control panel, you can notice the presence of a new menu specifically for Addition, and of course we will head to the Schema section:

Once you go to the Skima settings within the SmartCrawl add-on, the main settings page will appear to you, with sub-options within it, as in the following image:

You can fill in the settings around the site name within the (Website Details) field, as well as its logo, and when you start using it, you will find that the name of your site and its general details that were previously set within WordPress are present within those fields.

By scrolling down on the same page, you will be able to choose the main classification of your site, whether it is a site that expresses an organization – which is the appropriate option in most cases – or the option that expresses a person:

You can continue to fill these boxes with the appropriate settings without any problem, but by looking at the sub-settings of the Schema section in the add-on above, you will find other boxes, which are Advanced options, Settings options, and finally Type Builder options, which are the most important.

By going to Advanced options, you can modify more options related to your site and SEO performance in general, in addition to search engine optimization settings in general.

Since the plugin is based on the Schema settings, the advanced settings also include settings related to structured data/data organization:

Using the Types Builder feature in SmartCrawl

The Types Builder feature is one of the most important features in the SmartCrawl plugin ever, and it is the main reason for choosing this plugin when talking about Schema in WordPress.

This is because this feature allows you to create custom types of schema very simply, a process that may be easy or difficult depending on your technical experience, but it may be very important in different types of websites.

As previously mentioned, the SmartCrawl add-on already includes default layouts and supports them fully, but this option comes to creating modified layouts, and you can start using it by going to the Types Builder options within the layout settings in the add-on:

When you click on the (Add New Type) option, the process of adding a new schema begins, and this window appears for us to choose the appropriate classification from:

You can choose the appropriate classification for your site and its pages from among these different classifications, with the presence of specialized classifications such as WooCommerce products, courses, job sites, and many others. When choosing the appropriate classification, we click on Continue to continue. In a test article, we have chosen a product, and here the add-on asks you about The label you want for this type:

Here some advanced stages begin to appear before you, which we will discuss in the following points:

Using nested properties in schema type

You can use nested properties for each schema, and thus you can combine properties that are known to be specific to a particular schema within another schema, and this can be done easily through addition.

If we give an example of the specific schema of articles, the addition can specify some specialized elements, as follows:

As you can see from the previous image, the extension allows you to set rules that must be met, and you can choose for the article to be attributed to a specific section, for example, or you can also add a larger number of settings:

Read also: 4 ways to add FAQ Schema to your WordPress website

Adding a Collection based on repetition

While you are working on editing and developing the architecture for your site or for specific pages, you may go through a stage that makes the page subject to more than one specific classification, and at this stage it is preferable to rely on the Collection feature and the Repeater feature within the same add-on.

Here you can make the schema serve more than one of the default classifications, and you can click the add button to be able to add more settings to the same schema:

Positive results can appear on the page after examining it based on the Rich Results Test , in addition to the ability to easily identify skima.

Optimizing schema based on Loops

In the previous point we talked about the repeat feature, which is referred to as repeaters within the plugin, and although it is quite useful in particular, in some cases the amount of data is too large to be entered manually within the Type Builder tool.

For example, if you are working on a product schema, as in the first example, the duplicate/repeats feature will enable you to add reviews to the product schema, but a problem may occur if the same reviews are deleted from your site.

Here, we can rely on the Loops feature, which is a software feature built into the add-on, and the user does not need to hire a professional developer to accomplish the task because Loops are integrated into SmartCrawl.

As we explained in the previous points, this feature depends on updating data automatically, and it can be relied upon – for example – to add Skima to comments, which also appear in Google results.

As an example, we follow these steps:

1. Click on the Add Property button within the schema you want to modify
2. The Add Properties window appears, responsible for adding settings
3. Choose Comments, or the modification you want
4. Here you can add a group of comments that will be repeated professionally and automatically as well. Below is an illustrative image:

Choose specific settings 

We previously talked about the validity of Schema settings, as you will not be able to add a specific Schema to a page of your site since Google does not recognize or support it, and this is the case with the Schema.org organization itself.

For example, if you choose Skima for employment sites, Job Posting , you must choose the appropriate and correct settings – or values ​​- otherwise your Skima will be inactive.

The SmartCrawl add-on includes the correct settings for each skima, so you must choose them and fill them correctly, as in the following image:

Conclusion

Improving the performance of search engines has become a necessity, as we talked about, and it is not something optional that you can do or neglect to do. Skima plays a major role in improving the performance of search engines and improving the way your site pages are displayed in search results.

In addition, the role of Skima is a major role that cannot be dispensed with if your site serves an uncommon goal, or if you want to provide a competitive advantage that will make you superior to competitors, even if only by a small amount.

Start now to adjust the architecture of your WordPress site if you need to. There is no doubt that starting with the SmartCrawl plugin is a good start.