Microdata/Schema/Rich Snippets

1

I’ve been avoiding looking into the whole world of schema.org, microdata and rich snippets as my brain can’t cope with too many things at the same time. The last time I looked into such things was Jeremy Keith at the dConstruct Conference getting rather excited about Microformats. It seems however that the world has moved on and that the big search engines are using schema.org. I haven’t quite got my head round things but it seams that schema.org is a type of microdata and rich snippets is an implentation of this? It also seems that Google can’t or couldn’t cope with the combination of schema.org and microformats, but this may have changed. Please do correct me if I am wrong here.

I know that Roots implements microformats for posts, specifically the hNews microformat. I wondered what the thinking was about implementing schema.org into Roots markup. Perhaps some of this markup should not be included since it depends on the type of content the site has, but I think it would be useful to have some documentation on best practices here. There are also some plugins that add rich snippets (such as SEOPressor and Yoast’s SEO plugin)

My feeling is that it would be good to add some limited schema.org stuff to Roots:

html tag

This might be difficult to implement since every web page is different, but adding a base and type to the html tag would be helpful to describe what kind of page it is.

title tag

It would be very easy to mark up the title as such:
<title itemprop="name"><?php wp_title('|', true, 'right'); ?></title>

Main Content

Main content could be marked up like this:
<article <?php post_class(); ?> itemprop="mainContentOfPage" itemscope="itemscope" itemtype="http://schema.org/WebPageElement">

Conclusion

Anyway, I am not an expert, I am only starting to look into this, but I’d love your thoughts. I though of creating an issue on GitHub, but best to have a discussion here first.

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Interesting discussions on the Yoast Plugin GitHib repo:


and on this article:
http://leaves-and-love.net/how-to-improve-wordpress-seo-with-schema-org/

Be great if we could bake some microdata into Roots.

3

There’s a schema for almost everything, and being a starter theme I think it’d be best to leave it up to the user to implement. A friend & old coworker of mine, Kyle Geminden, has a theme based on Roots with lots of schema markup: https://github.com/kylegeminden/satuswp

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Thanks, Ben. What you say makes sense. It just seems that schema.org is the best way forwards and what generally seems to be being used. I brought it up because Roots was already using MicroFormats so I wondered whether Microdata might be a welcome addition.

Perhaps the best thing to do here is for someone to write some example code on how you can RichSnippetify Roots. I’ll take a look at your friend’s theme. At a quick glance, it looks like it stems from pre-theme-wrapper days, but could well be very useful.

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Wow! thanks! I will try it, Ben.