Structured data
Structured data is standardised information about something that is designed to be easily recognised for what it is. A ticket is structured data, or a driving licence or passport or a postage stamp or just a coin. A form to be filled in is structured data. In one form or another, "structured data" is everywhere.
Some things with structure are less structured than others. A web page has structure by being divided into a <head> and a <body> with the <head> typically being the more structured of the two because that is its purpose: to provide standardised data for web browsers to make sense of without too much trouble. The <body> of a web page, on the other hand, can be just about anything. In <body> there is no standardised way to represent a product or a service.
From Google's introduction to structured data markup in Google Search:
Google Search works hard to understand the content of a page. You can help us by providing explicit clues about the meaning of a page to Google by including structured data on the page. Structured data is a standardized format for providing information about a page and classifying the page content; for example, on a recipe page, what are the ingredients, the cooking time and temperature, the calories, and so on. Adding structured data can enable search results that are more engaging to users and might encourage them to interact more with your website, which are called rich results.
superMicro CMS version 5.9 onwards provides an option for each page to include a JSON-LD structured data snippet for selling products with 'rich results' in Google Search. Think of the snippet as an invisible little 'ticket' in the <head> of a page.
How to use
The structured data is either one line or twelve lines:
Description here with no linebreaks (150 characters maximum)
"@type": "Product",
"name": "Art Print",
"author": "Josephine Bloggs",
"image": "https://image-url.jpg",
"description": "Archival quality paper and inks",
"offers": {
"@type": "Offer",
"url": "https://page-url",
"priceCurrency": "GBP",
"price": "60.00"
}
The first line (shown blue} is used for the 'meta description' and Open Graph description of the page. The eleven lines that follow it are the JSON-LD structured data snippet. Edit the text in red, making sure to leave the punctuation exactly 'as is'. To do the snippet properly you will need to be familiar with Google's requirements for it to be valid. It can be tested using Google's rich results test.
The JSON-LD structured data snippet in superMicro CMS is for pages selling a product and is no use for anything else. The 'meta description' and Open Graph description of the page are useful for any web page. To include the snippet in a page, make sure there are twelve lines exactly, as above. If there are less than twelve, only the 'meta description' and Open Graph description (the blue text) will be included in the page.
Note: the 'meta description' will not be displayed unless it contains more than twelve characters, including spaces. If you don't want to add a 'meta description' and Open Graph description but you do want the JSON-LD structured data snippet, just write "None." on the first line.
When you have suitably edited the structured data, 'Get page data' in 'admin/pages', enter it (either one line or twelve lines) and 'Update data'.
This experimental feature of superMicro CMS 5.9 is currently in use on the print pages of Patrick Taylor Art.
