Yoast SEO 11.0: Schema.org – Joost de Valk and Jono Alderson discuss

But it is going one step furtherthan we've ever gone before.

And I think it's the first step further thananyone has ever gone before with this type of code and approach.

We see a lot of people implementing thisin quite bitty ways, like you can have a plug-inthat gives you recipes or you might have a themethat marks up your breadcrumbs, but nobody's connecting it in this way.

Alright guys, we're here to talkabout the release of Yoast SEO 11.

0.

It's going to be a big release particularly because we're going to be doinga lot about schema in this release.

Can you talk aboutwhat the benefit of schema is? Well, the benefit of schemais a large thing to talk about.

So in 11.

0 I did a lot of work myselfwith the rest of the team to implement a lot of schema based on a doc that Jonohad been working on.

Schema is basically metadata for your sitein a way that machines can read it.

And we have an entire course about that so I won't get into all the detailsof what it is and how it works, but Google uses it, Pinterest uses it, more and more other platforms use it and with this release we've made the schemathat we already had in Yoast SEO a lot better.

And the practical applications are.

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If you have recipes, or events, or a local business or an album, or any number of things that your businessrepresents beyond just having a website suddenly Google, Pinterest, Facebookcan process those, can extract them and they can do things like showrich results in search engines, built on understandingthe relationship between them.

And the benefits are enormous.

So we've already had some of thisin Yoast SEO and what we've added is that we haveadded some types of schema and will add more overtime, but we have also turned them allinto one thing so you had these different blocks of codeon your page that represented small bits of infoon that page in the schema.

Here is my breadcrumbs, here's my webpage, here's my author of this article, but they are all just bits.

Yeah, and in this releasewe have tied that altogether so you now have, okay this is the page, this is the author of this page, this page is published by this organizationor this person.

Has this address, has this image, and you see it's all cohesive.

So we have tied that altogether, the people that we have spoken to atsearch engines are really excited about this because it makes thingsa lot easier for them and they will presumably because of thatbe helpful in some way.

But it is going one step furtherthan we've ever gone before.

And I think it's the first step furtherthan anyone has ever gone before with this type of code and approach.

We see a lot of people implementing thisin quite bitty ways, like you can have a plug-inthat gives you recipes or you might have a themethat marks up your breadcrumbs, but nobody's connecting it in this way.

And that's I think why people from Googleand other areas are waiting in and starting to say, can we treat this a bit?Can we build on this? So what happened literally was that Jonowas writing documentation for this and he opened it up in Twitter and then suddenly a Google engineerstarted stepping in and started commenting on that documentand saying, this is an external document, but this is a good idea.

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Shouldn't we be doing this or that? And it really becamea bit of a community effort to make that thing better and then for me to code it was just like, okay, so there's a spec here.

Let me code this entire spec.

It cost me about two weeks of my life.

I might not have seen my kidsas much as I should have, but other than that, it was really like it's all there.

We have this full documentation nowwhat it should look like.

And part of the thing we wanted to achieve, which I think we've done, is that if you are, you know, a butcher or a baker, or somebody like any local business, if you just run your site and you say, I'm a butcher, this is my address, we take care of all of that in the backgroundautomatically.

You don't have to worry aboutall the markup and the structure.

The system is smart enoughjust to build all of that out, which is awesome.

There are some schema plug-ins out therethat have a lot of fields for you to fill out, separate to your content.

We tried to do away with thatand just make it as easy as possible.

There's going to be a lot more in thatfor the rest of the year, but for now, really, what you get with 11.

0is a huge change.

And the other thing worth mentioning is that it creates a foundationthat other people can build on.

So there's other plug-ins, theme developers etc.

can take the work we've doneand extended it.

So rather than being hundreds of thingsin this ecosystem, all output in bitty things, we can say, no, there is one solid graph, one representation of your business, your products, your prices, your reviewsand it all just stitches together.

So we're expecting this to open up a cascade of new opportunitiesand cool stuff.

So that all sounds very cool and practicaland very technical.

Which features can users play withas of 11.

0? What kind of things can it practically do? The scary bit here is thatwith all the code that we've added we've only really changedone tiny option in the admin.

So you can choose whether your websiterepresents a company or a person, and if it represents a person you now haveto pick a user that your site represents.

So like this is my personal siteand it's my blog and my opinions and then suddenly all the schema stuff says, okay the person who runs this site is the same person who wrotethat blog post that this site is about, that has these attributes, Aad then Google can understand– And it's the same as this person on Twitter, this person on Facebook, this person on LinkedIn.

So we can tie all that together.

But other than that, they don't have to doanything other than update.

Just click a button.

Nice.

Good luck.

So this sounds like a bigger projectand just what you are releasing in 11.

0– Well, schema is a huge project.

Schema itself is an open sourceopen standard.

So we are actively contributing to itand looking at it and how can we make this betterand more is definitely coming.

We're talking to Google and Bing about howthis is being used and what we can do with it.

And how did you get started on this pathtowards better schema? What triggered this? What triggered this was usbuilding schema blocks for Yoast SEO, so the Gutenberg blocks that we're buildingto make things better.

And then we needed a way to combinethe output from the schema blocks with the other schema that we hadon the page and then Jono was doing independentresearch, basically, on how the graph works and how you can combine all the schemainto one graph for a website and a page.

And basically that's a databaseof what is this thing but in such a waythat you can describe everything.

And also there wasn'tan approach for this.

So if I've got a plug-inthat outputs a recipe on the page and I've got another plug-in that says this is the organizationwho runs this website, there was no way to connect them and Gutenberg really opened upthe requirements.

If we're going to have all these blocksand things on the page we need them to talk to each other.

And there wasn't a way to do that, so we worked it out.

One of the thingsthat was actually very practical is Pinterest, we were talking to themand they were telling us that on WooCommerce sitesthey often couldn't figure out what the primary product of the page was.

So they literally had a problemthat there was a product and then four related productsand then were five bits of schema.

And they didn't know which of those fivewas the primary product.

And we've now solved that with adding likeone or two lines of code, we can just say this is the main entityof this page.

So this is the primary product;the rest are related products to this product.

And then suddenly Pinterest knowshow to pass that page and can show the primary productin its rich pin for that page.

Sounds great.

I think everyone should check out 11.

0when it comes out.

Absolutely.

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