[Tutorial] Enhance your content model with schema.org markup using WordLift Mappings
WordLift Mappings is a new and powerful feature of WordLift, that allows anyone — without any coding skills — to add schema.org markup to their websites enhancing the holistic perspective of the content model with structured data. Going too fast?
Probably yes. If not, just skip to the video. ?
Let’s define a few basic concepts
What is schema.org markup and why is it important for SEO?
As you might already know, Schema.org is an initiative launched in 2011 by the world’s biggest search engines (Bing, Google and Yahoo!) to implement a data schema structure to describe web pages. On 1 November 2011 Russian largest search engine Yandex also joined the community.
By adding schema.org markup to web pages, content is interlinked with data and becomes more accessible. In terms of SEO, being created by the search engines themselves, schema.org is the most useful vocabulary.
It basically helps search engines understand your content by allowing them to get its meaning and interpret the relationships inside and between web pages. This is what you need, as a publisher, a marketer or a content creator, to push your content in front of the right audience answering in a relevant way to their search intents.
What is a content model?
The content model is the framework that allows organizations to codify and shape their content wealth into a modular and connected structure. In fact, the content model:
- Specifies how information is organized on your website
- Makes content more predictable and therefore understandable for search engines
- Allows you to reuse content through different channels.
If you rethink content separating it from its containers, then you can work on its structure thinking at a website level (or even at an enterprise level) and not just at the level of a single page.
Therefore, content modeling can be defined as the law that underlies your content. Structuring the content of your website allows you to reuse it in different formats and match different search intents.
To help you understand, I will give you an example: in WordLift, we base all our content production on the Entity Based Content Model. In the graph below, you can see the Entity Based Content Model applied to the WordLift Academy: each main content is a webinar which is connected to different data points (such as creation date and duration), other entities (such as the topics covered during the webinar and the main speaker), and media (such as the cover image, the profile picture of the speaker, and the video recording). This content model allows us to split our content into small meaningful chunks and to repurpose our content in different formats.
To better understand this concept, follow Cruce Saunder, the world-expert in the field of content intelligence, in this webinar about content modeling for SEO.
As you can imagine given this premises, Schema.org markup becomes extremely powerful when you add it on the basis of your content model. Suddenly you can share with search engines not just pieces of content, but your content architecture as you have it in mind.
What does WordLift Mappings exactly do?
WordLift Mappings helps you add structured data to your content model, structuring your content with the schema.org markup and allowing you to build a tailored knowledge graph.
Now that you have all the pieces of this puzzle, let’s understand how to implement WordLift Mappings on your website.
What do you need to implement Mappings on your website?
If you are using WordPress as a CMS, you will need these plugins:
- WordLift Plugin (Mappings need to be activated)
- Advanced Custom Fields Plugin
If you have all these things on your website, you are ready to follow Doreid Haddad in this tutorial to enhance your content model with the help of WordLift Mappings.
WordLift Mappings step-by-step tutorial
Our SEO Expert Doreid Haddad will guide you step-by-step in this short tutorial. Ready?
Wrap-up
Mappings is an advanced feature of WordLift that provides you a simple way to structure content with schema.org markup and help search engines understand your entire content model.
To use WordLift Mappings, you need to have both WordLift and the ACF plugins installed in your WordPress website.
Customizing the markup of your content means:
- customizing the entity type of your pages, based i.e. on custom post types
- adding new schema.org properties that might be relevant to search engines and users
- connecting each piece of content to other ones that can be additional fields on your page, other pages inside and outside of your website, and more.
If you like this feature but you still need some assistance…
Don’t hesitate to contact our experts: they will schedule a call or a meeting with you, help you understand how to structure your content and customize your WordLift Plan on the basis of your specific needs.