Google uses schema.org structured data to show information about a website on their search results pages. Needless to say, it is a good pratice from an SEO point of view to use schema.org microdata when possible.
When performing a Google search for a brand name, you are often greeted with an information box on the right side of the search results. This box includes information about your query; in the case of ‘Google Inc.’ you are shown some basic information such as the current CEO, an introduction text and social media profiles (including social media icons) for the major social platform (i.e. Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+, Twitter and Google’s YouTube).
You can have Google show this information for your own website as well. For this information to show up, you have to specify your social profiles to Google with the use of schema.org markup code. Currently, Google supports these types of social profiles: Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Instagram, YouTube, LinkedIn, Myspace, Pinterest, SoundCloud and Tumblr.
When you are an organisation, use the following markup with JSON-LD:
<script type="application/ld+json">
{
"@context" : "http://schema.org",
"@type" : "Organization",
"name" : "Vanhoutte Inc.",
"url" : "http://vanhoutte.be",
"sameAs" : [
"https://www.facebook.com/your-profile",
"https://twitter.com/yourProfile",
"https://plus.google.com/your_profile"
]
}
</script>Replace "@type" : "Organization" with "@type" : "Person" if you want to include your personal social media accounts (e.g. for your personal homepage rather than the company page). This piece of code should be inserted into your <head></head> tags of your HTML document(s).
Or, instead of JSON-LD, you could rather implement the schema.org markup code:
<span itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Organization"> <link itemprop="url" href="https://vanhoutte.be"> <a itemprop="sameAs" href="https://www.facebook.com/your-company">FB</a> <a itemprop="sameAs" href="https://www.twitter.com/YourCompany">Twitter</a></span>
Instead of <span></span>, you could also work with a <div></div>. And again, in this example you can swap Organization for Person, depending on your use case.
When you finished implementing the correct markup into your webpage(s), you should check for valid schema.org code to verify search engines correctly identify your code as intended.
All good! If you want to learn about schema.org, I have plenty of posts about schema.org structured data and I often write about WordPress too.
Hi Thomas,
Just wanted to ask you one question.
On what pages do you recommend the structured markup be placed? All of them? Just the homepage?
Thanks,
Hi Nzden
I suggest you apply this to all the pages that can be shared publicly.
Is JSON-LD the only way to do this? Cause I have no idea what that means or how to work with it. Is there a regular microdata markup for social networks? Thanks.
Please, ignore me. I clearly can’t read properly. Haha Thanks for the tutorial!
I was trying to do it, thank you very much
Thanks!
Hello I have done it in the past but always misses one/two/three of the Social media accounts that I added on the script.
What could be the problem?
Should we insert that Json code at every pages of our site?
Thank you very much for your article. Your article helped me to implement schema.org markup in my website.
This is a great job, I got to learn a lot from it and I am thankful that you wrote this article.
Thanks a lot for putting nice article on google structured data markup, i am a legal professional, no knowledge of structured data markup but due to your guidance i did google structured data markup.
Hello Sinul
thanks for your comment.
Great to read that you have succesfully implemented structure data on your website. I’m glad the instructions were clear to you.
Have a nice day
Thomas
Thanks for sharing. Finally, I have added successfully into my website
Thank you for sharing this informative and well-structured blog post. The topic you covered is relevant, and your explanations were clear and concise. To delve deeper into this subject, click here. Well done!