What is JSON-LD?
JSON-LD is a lightweight Linked Data format to easily read and write structured data on the web using open vocabularies like schema.org. Recommended by the World Wide Web Consortium, JSON-LD is the heir of the JSON format and allows linked data to operate in a Web-scale environment. The idea behind this notation is to provide search engines with contextual information about a web page using semantic web technologies. This helps to improve the match between the intent of the searcher and the content being published.
How can I use JSON-LD on my website?
JSON has been traditionally used by UX designers to feed widgets with data. With the advent of JSON-LD, developers can reuse this same data structures to create new front-end UI widgets as well as feeding search engine crawlers with the metadata that describe the exact meaning of page’s content.
JSON-LD uses the vocabulary of Schema.org to describe what a web page is about. A presentation layer can be added with custom UI elements developed in either Polymer or React components.
How can I add JSON-LD to my WordPress website?
There are various plugin to include Schema.org JSON-LD syntax markup to your WordPress website. WordLift is one of these options that above all has the advantage of adding this tags automatically based on the analysis of the content being written. WordLift uses Natural Language Processing to extract named entities that are proposed to the editor to tag his/her content. These entities have unique IDs (unique resource identifier) in the web of data, with this IDs WordLift extracts the information and automatically injects it in the web pages using JSON-LD.
What if – instead – you’d like to give your readers the opportunity to go deeper into some entity, but don’t want them to leave your article? Well, we are also thinking about that…
How to reuse the metadata about an entity in the front-end of your website
See the Pen Parsing JSON-LD by nicola bertelloni (@wanbinkimoon) on CodePen.
Why is JSON-LD the best format for structured data?
The advantages of using JSON-LD to write structured data compared to other formats like microdata are the following:
- It does not affect the performance of the page because it can be loaded asynchronously
- It is injected in the page without impacting on the existing HTML structure and tags
- It is easy to be reused by web developers as it follows the JSON syntax
- It leverages on linked data
That is also why Google incentives websites owners to use structured data on a web page in the form of JSON-LD. This format allows entities, therefore concepts to become linked.