JSON-LD is a Linked Data format that is used to represent meaningful content to search engines and web crawlers.
Have you used structured data before. The JSON-LD is a lightweight Linked Data format that is used to read and write structured data on the web. The JSON-LD format is based on JSON (javascript object notation), and help provide a way to make JSON data interoperate at web-scale.
Structured Data supported formats:
structured data can be written using various formats:
- JSON-LD (recommended): The JSON-LD written as JSON objects in <script> tag.
- Microdata: Open-community html specification in which structured data written using html markup and html attributes.
- RDFa: HTML5 extension that supports linked-data by using html tag attributes that correspond to the user visible content.
What is JSON-LD benefits?
Since JSON-LD format can write structured data, the primary benefits of JSON-LD is to improve (SEO) search engine appearance by providing search crawlers with contextual information about web pages.
JSON-LD can describe entities and content of websites such as news websites, ecommerce platforms, blogs, etc.
An example JSON-LD structured data that describe news detail document:
<script type="application/ld+json">
{
"@context": "https://schema.org/",
"@type": "NewsArticle",
"name": "Sample Post Title",
"image": ["http://example.com/news/img.jpg"]
"author": {
"@type": "Person",
"name": "Webmobtuts"
},
"datePublished": "2023-03-10",
"description": "This is short news description"
}
</script>
The JSON-LD format is written between <script> tag of type=”application/ld+json”. The format is similar to standard JSON format with key-value pairs.
JSON-LD has reserved keys that describe the entity of a web document. There are mandatory keys and optional keys. From the mandatory keys the @context, @type. The @type key describe the type of the entity like “NewsArticle“, “Recipe“, “Video“, “Event“, etc.
You can read more about each structured data category that google search supports here.
How to Add JSON-LD To a Website?
JSON-LD can be added to website using many ways. The first method custom javascript by generating and injecting the <script> tag by yourself which can somehow tedious. The second method is to download the JSON-LD package according to your programming language. For CMS platforms like wordpress there are already available plugins that can do this for you and inject the JSON-LD code in the <head> tags.
