If you want to make a name for yourself in the massive realm of the World Wide Web (WWW), you may need more than merely creating a good-looking, feature-rich website. To make your website or page visible to as many people as possible, you must promote it through search engine optimization. It is a crucial digital marketing strategy used to rank websites or pages on the top of the search engine result pages (SERPs).
Search engines like Google, Yahoo Search, Bing, etc. use a complex algorithm that rates the web pages on the SERPs based on several factors. But first, the algorithms should be able to understand what a particular page is all about. Otherwise, they won’t be able to rank your website.
If you want the search engines to understand exactly what your website or page is about, you must use a structured data type called schema markups. These schema markups use a unique vocabulary of tags or code snippets (also called “schema”).
Search engines recognize the structured data on a web page through schema plugins and create rich snippets to showcase additional info alongside the search result. This info may include prices, calories (in the case of food items), ratings (in several formats), duration (in the case of food recipes), etc.
In this blog, we have covered the different types of schema markup plugins and how you can select the best one. We have also listed and compared the best WordPress schema markup plugins.
Types Of Schema Markup Plugins For WordPress
Schema markup plugins can help include structured data on your website. That allows the search engines to understand your website’s contents better so that the algorithms can rank it on the SERPs more suitably.
Here are the types of schema markup plugins for WordPress websites:
- General schema markup plugins: These plugins provide a wide range of schema markup options covering a variety of content, from articles and reviews to products and events.
- All-in-one plugins: As the name suggests, these are all-purpose plugins with a variety of SEO features, including schema markup, as part of their suite of tools.
- Specific schema markup plugins: These plugins can add structured data of particular content types, like recipes, job postings, and local businesses.
- Custom schema markup plugins: With these plugins, you can create a fully customized schema markup for showing particular rich snippets with your web page on the SERPs.
- Page builder plugins with built-in schema markup: These plugins offer page builders with which you can design web pages with built-in schema markups.
- Theme-specific schema markup plugins: The WordPress repository has some themes with schema markup features built-in to improve the ranking of a website through SEO.
You can choose any schema markup plugin type based on the kind of structure data you want to include on the website. The general and all-in-one plugins would do just fine for the simple content types. You can go for specific schema plugins or custom schema plugins for more specialized or customized structured data.
How To Select The Best Schema Markup Plugin For Your Website?
There are several different schema markup plugins available in the WordPress official repository. But you must choose the most suitable one for the desired outcomes. So we have listed out a few selection criteria factors that can help you narrow down your options and choose the best one:
- Compatibility
Choosing a schema markup compatible with the other plugins and themes already installed on the website would be best. If your chosen schema markup Incompatible plugin is incompatible with the others, it may result in unnecessary errors, impacting the quality and performance of the website.
- User Friendliness
Your chosen schema markup plugin should be user-friendly, with clearly-listed settings and options. So that anyone, regardless of their web development experience, can easily include rich snippets on the website. It would also help if the plugin came with clear documentation and excellent support so that you can start using it instantly and troubleshoot any issues that may arise.
- Availability of structured data types
Look for a schema markup plugin supporting various structured data types like events, reviews, articles, and products. The more types of structured data the plugin supports, the more flexible and versatile it will be for your website.
- Customization options
A plugin offering customization options would be better for your website, allowing you to modify the schema markup as necessary. That includes adding custom fields and modifying the existing ones.
- Pricing
One of the most significant factors to consider while selecting a schema markup plugin is its cost. Some plugins offer free versions with limited features, while others are paid only. But you can opt for a free trial to see if the features provided by a particular plugin are worth the price.
Following these criteria, you can select your website’s most suitable schema markup plugin to achieve higher rankings on the SERPs.
Top WordPress Schema Markup Plugins
One of the most significant advantages of WordPress is its plugins, and this CMS has thousands of them. Some of these plugins can help you add structured data to your website so that the search algorithms can better understand and rank the pages on the SERPs.
A few of the best schema markup plugins for adding structured data to your website are:
Rank Math is a WordPress plugin popular for its comprehensive suite of SEO features, including schema markup. This plugin can help automate the process of adding schema to your website, reducing your workload while ensuring the search crawlers can index your pages more effortlessly.
Although Rank Math has a free version, the schema markup-related features could be more substantial. So you would be better off with one of its paid plans.
As the name suggests, WP Review is a WordPress plugin for reviewing websites. But it can also help you include rich snippets for your website to Google. This plugin is especially preferred for its compatibility with Google Rich Snippets and other programs. It has several predefined schema designs and multiple rating systems (i.e., Point, Circle, Star, Percentage, Thumbs, etc.).
Review & Schema is a WordPress plugin offering robust JSON-LD-based structured data schema solutions for nearly every website. With this plugin, you can generate structured data schema using JSON-LD automatically and manually.
Although you can get the free version of this plugin straight from the official WordPress repository, it needs more noteworthy features. But the premium version of Review & Schema available on the developer website, though more expensive, will be more feature-rich.
Schema App is an end-to-end schema markup solution for helping websites and pages with better user experience and higher rankings on the SERPs. Through this plugin, you can have nine schema types by default, and if you opt for the paid premium version, more tools will be available for creating the best SEO strategies.
SNIP is a WordPress plugin created by WPBuddy for adding structured data markup to web pages more efficiently. It supports a variety of schema types (including article, event, product, review, recipe, etc.), which makes it quite suitable for almost every kind of website, from a simple single-page one to massive eCommerce websites.
You can use any of the WordPress mentioned above plugins to improve the website’s visibility on the search engine results pages. They may also help improve accessibility for anyone with disabilities. Through structured data, assistive tech like screen readers can interpret and present the content on your web pages more efficiently.
If you need clarification about choosing between them or need help implementing them, hiring a WordPress development company would be better. Their experts can install and implement the best plugins for the purpose and get the best out of them for optimum performance and organic traffic.
Conclusion
WordPress has over 60,000 plugins in its official repository, which can help you reform every inch and aspect of a website, from the appearance to complex functionalities, like schema markups and rich snippets.
Schema markup is structured data that helps the search algorithms understand the contents of a web page and crawl through it more efficiently. Not only does that ensure the web page achieves a higher ranking on the SERPs, but it also means a better overall user experience.
A few of the plugins shown above are comprehensive SEO plugins with schema markup abilities built-in, and the rest are dedicated schema plugins. But all of them are more than capable of adding structured data to your website so that it’s easily comprehensible by the search algorithms.
Do you still need clarification about which schema markup plugin to choose or how to use it? Then hire a professional WordPress developer and worry no more. They’ll install the best one and help you improve the organic traffic on the website.
Photo by Solen Feyissa on Unsplash
