5-minute guide to Structured Data

A beginner-friendly introduction to structured data, schema vocabulary, testing, and search visibility.

The problem it solves

A search engine reading a page sees text. It can infer a great deal, but it is inferring. Structured data lets the page state directly that this string is a publication date, that one is an author, and the page as a whole describes an article.

Vocabulary and format

Schema.org provides the shared vocabulary: the type names and property names that describe articles, events, products, organisations, recipes and so on. The format that carries it is usually JSON-LD, a block of structured markup in the page head that does not touch the visible HTML at all.

That separation is the practical advantage of JSON-LD over the older inline approaches. Nothing in the layout has to change to add or correct it.

Mark up what is really on the page

The rule that matters is that the markup must describe content the visitor can actually see. Marking up a rating or a date that appears nowhere on the page is the fastest route to having the markup ignored entirely.

Test it

Validation tools parse a page or a pasted block and report what they understood, which errors are fatal, and which properties are recommended but missing. Running that check before publishing takes a minute and catches the bracket-level mistakes that otherwise silently invalidate the whole block.