We are happy to announce that we’ve released a new plugin – Microdata that you may use in order to increase traffic and improve CTRs of your classified ads site by providing extra details about listings to users in the SERPS.
The Plugin marks up details of the pages to help search engines and parsers clearly identify data types. It is necessary to receive data with details and ensure that pages contain all required content. Such data are provided to users within SERPs and may be used by applications for generating page previews or for other purposes.
Is Microdata useful for Your site?
Microdata may include the name of your product/service, price, location, comments, ratings, brief description, etc. In other words, microdata is short information about the main characteristics of your product or service that can help your users understand whether they want to open your site in order to learn more about a certain listing or not.
Microdata is of great use for website promotion in organic search results, particularly for stimulating traffic, making your listings more attractive to a potential visitor, reducing the bounce rate, and improving ratings.
Marking up the data
The markup is implemented in two ways: adding attributes directly to tags on the page, or adapting the page content to the structure of schema.org, or by adding a code section in the json-ld format to the page. Since the first method requires modification to the source code of the entire template and is rather complicated, we have chosen to apply the second method, which includes adding a block of code to the page header in the json-ld format.
Microdata Types
The Microdata plugin uses the Logo and Breadcrumbs microdata types for all website pages.
Your site will definitely benefit from the demonstration of your logo in the Google sidebar on the search results page. That will allow you to add extra branding and give weight to your site in the SERPS.
Besides, breadcrumbs ensure the correct formation of rich snippets in Google Search – in addition to the heading and description, the microdata page may include breadcrumbs, which improve the appearance of the snippet and, therefore, its CTRs.
- For pages offering event listing details (created with the Events Calendar plugin), the Plugin uses the event microdata type.
- For details of vacancy or resume listings, the Plugin uses the jobPosting microdata type.
- For the other types of listings (for sale, motors, properties, etc.), the Plugin uses the product microdata type.
- If you run the Comments/Reviews plugin on your classified site, the Plugin will also add the rating details.
- The Plugin uses the news microdata type on the news pages.
- If the FAQs plugin is installed, the Plugin will apply the faqs microdata type to its pages.
Admin Panel and User Interface
The Plugin does not add a manager with settings to the back end. However, the Administrator can disable the Plugin from the listing type settings. By default, microdata is generated for all the pages and listing types.
The Plugin does not interact with the front end and does not affect the website performance. The block of the code in the json-ld format is not displayed in the user interface and is used solely by search engines or other parsers.
Microdata is useful for both owners of classified websites and listing owners. When it is displayed in search results, the user can assess the relevance of the information provided on your website for him and its correspondence to his search request. Being an effective and free tool of website promotion, microdata is used widely by webmasters. Therefore, our Microdata plugin is something that you might want to consider.