Recent changes implemented by Google are aimed at their long-term goal which is better search results for search engine end-users.
The short answer to the question “How can you have your website displayed more often in the search results” is given by Google’s John Mueller who suggests “following the company’s official structured data requirements to ensure content is eligible to be displayed as a rich result.”
Generally speaking, WordPress website owners will approach this issue the same way as non-WordPress ones, but you will have a plethora of developed plugins that will help you do it easier and faster.
If the final goal is to have a web page displayed as a rich result in Google, then following the company’s official requirements is highly recommended, but there are numerous other types of structured data available for webmasters to use.
What is Structured Data?
The technical term “adding structured data” is also known as “schema markup” by webmasters, and it requires a bit of technical knowledge about how websites work. It can give your website a significant SEO boost and increase your search rankings if done properly.
What structured data is? It is a type of code that makes your website content easier to “read” by search engine bots. Essentially it helps crawl bots go through it, organize and later to display the content as a search result.
If it’s easy for search engines to crawl your website, you’ll get a SEO advantage.
How to add structured data to your WordPress website
The basic way of adding structured data to a website is by adding code. For example, when you add schema markup, your contact information page will contain code such as:
By adding such code you will “tell the search engine” that your contact information is your contact information. Because you are a WordPress website owner, you are in luck as you will not have to learn any coding, but we will be using a plugin.
One of the currently most popular WordPress plugins for adding structured data is Schema and Structured Data for WP & AMP with which we need to familiarize ourselves with the structured data formats.
Schema & Structured Data plugin features 33 schema types such as Blog Posting, News article, Local Business, Web page, Article, Recipe, Product, and Video Object … etc. with more coming over time. E-commerce website owners will be pleased to know that this plugin works with Woocommerce.
This plugin will generate schema markup for your whole site, and if needed you can even go in and manually edit the markup yourself.
Google’s Structured Data Markup Helper
Another method for adding structured data that’s pretty simple is by using Google’s Structured Data Markup Helper, and no matter where you host it or what kind of site it is.
Because we are focused on WordPress website owners I will not go too much into detail but it is worth mentioning that Google has made a totally free means of having structured data markup for any website.
Conclusion
Bear in mind that utilizing structured data does not guarantee for a web page that it will be displayed as a rich result, it makes it eligible to be displayed as a rich result, but the final choice is made between the eligible piers of that search query.
On the last note, I would like to quote Googles John Mueller stating that: “independently, you’re always welcome to use structured data to provide better machine-readable context for your pages. Which may not always result in visible changes, but can still help our systems to show your pages for relevant queries.”