Does Your Website Pass Google’s Structured Data Test? MD4.4.2 Has You Covered + New Site Tools

To get Marketers Delight 4.4.2 update the MD Theme + Plugin from the Appearance/Plugins menus in your WordPress dashboard. With active license keys, updates will be delivered to your site automatically.

There’s always something new and big going on in the world of SEO and in today’s landscape Markup Schema is a big player. Markup Schema is a tool that’s been around for a few years now, so while not exactly new, is constantly evolving with implications you may want to pay attention to as the web strives to become a faster place.

But what exactly is Markup Schema? From Moz:

Schema.org is the result of collaboration between Google, Bing, Yandex, and Yahoo! to help you provide the information their search engines need to understand your content and provide the best search results possible at this time. Adding Schema markup to your HTML improves the way your page displays in SERPs by enhancing the rich snippets that are displayed beneath the page title.

So in a nutshell, Markup Schema exists to provide better and more thorough results from your website to Google’s search rankings. You’ll notice from your own searches that some sites have extra information next to their links in Google like star ratings or author names—that’s schema in action.

As with anything SEO related you’re probably wondering whether or not Markup Schema will affect your site’s search rankings.

From the research I’ve done it doesn’t seem that providing Google with this additional information boosts your rankings in any noticeable way.

However, giving Google more data to add to your search results can create a more authoritative perception of your site to people searching for answers and potentially increase the amount of clicks you get from your rankings.

Or in other words: the more space you take up in Google the more people will take notice in the search results and click through to your site.

Missing the Markup in Marketers Delight

Since MD’s inception Markup Schema has been a part of your site. But after discussions in the forums and some testing of my own I realized that Marketers Delight as it is was missing the mark badly when it came to Markup Schema.

In fact, when I checked my sites running MD in the Google Search Console I found that Structured Data wasn’t even registering with Google. And if it did, the data reported back was hardly useful:

Admittedly when I first implemented Schema into MD I didn’t fully understand what it did or what all the best practices were.

After about a week of experimenting with Google’s Structured Data Tool, plenty of research, and a great discussion with my friend and Schema expert Ryan Rodden, I’ve implemented a much-improved Schema system into Marketers Delight 4.4.2.

It was such an improvement that this very site, MDNET, went from looking like the above screenshot to the one below after just a couple days of implementing the new Schema structure:

It’s now clear Google is scraping a lot more data from MDNET than it has been and I encourage you to do a before/after check of your site in the Google Search Console to see how your site fares with this new Structured Data.

Update Your Site to Get the Benefits of Markup Schema (and child theme template files)

To get Marketers Delight 4.4.2 update the MD Theme + Plugin from the Appearance/Plugins menus in your WordPress dashboard. With your active license key, these updates will be delivered to your site in a single click.

If you’ve customized your site with an MD Child Theme and overwritten any default templates, you need to update them to get the full power of this Schema update.

Luckily the changes made were small, with the bulk of the Schema being added to the new /content/content-schema.php template file.

The changed templates in the MD Theme are as follow:

• html.php
• header.php
• logo.php
• content-box.php
• sidebar.php
• footer.php
• /content/
  • /content/headline.php
  • /content/text.php
  • /content/menu.php
  • /content/byline.php

If you’ve changed any of these files in your Child Theme, open them up alongside the original file from the MD4.4.2 theme and compare any differences you find in the Schema formatting. This shouldn’t take you longer than 10 minutes, even if you’ve changed all these files. Post in the forums if you need any help with this process.

New: Add Tracking Scripts to Your Header + Footer With the New MD Site Tools

A highly requested feature around the community has been for the ability to add tracking scripts to the header and footer of your site. Up until now, I would have sent you to a 3rd party plugin to easily accomplish this, or show you how to hook scripts in with your Child Theme.

Alongside the massive Schema improvements in MD4.4.2, I’m happy to introduce you to the new Site Tools panel located in WP Dashboard > Marketers Delight > Site Tools.

I was hesitant to bring the Site Tools panel into MD so soon since I have big plans for it down the road. However, with the need for a Schema Publisher Logo upload field and the opportunity to finally address one of the biggest feature requests, it was easy to include Site Tools in this update.

With the new Header + Tracking Scripts panel you can easily add scripts to your site where you need them. Examples of scripts may be Google Analytics, favicon code, font scripts, embed scripts, etc.

As MD is all about precision, you also have the ability to add scripts to individual posts, pages, categories, and custom taxonomies with the Tracking Scripts meta box.

Most tracking scripts plugins only let you add custom scripts to posts or pages. MD is one of the only that will be available on category and taxonomy pages—a small detail I’m quite proud of.

These meta box controls will be great for scripts you don’t want to load sitewide and only on certain pages. A cornerstone of site optimization is to only load what you need and nothing more on a page, and loading unecessary scripts on a page can negatively impact website loading time.

One More Thing: Add a Header Tagline

Somewhere down the line the ability to add a small tagline under your logo was lost. MD4.4.2 brings it back, and all you have to do to add a tagline to your site is go to Appearance > Customizer > Site Identity and check the “Enable tagline” option.

Your tagline will neatly show in your header, with Markup Schema and all:

…and because this is MD, you have the ability to add/remove the tagline from anywhere you don’t want it with a simple click of the mouse from your post editor:

Marketers Delight 4.4.2 is Waiting for You in Your Dashboard. Go Get it.

As with every update, I encourage you to update as soon as possible. It will take a couple of days for Google to start picking up on your new structured data so the sooner you update the sooner you’ll see these results for yourself.

These regular updates to MD may be small but they add up to big things. I could spread myself thin and build multiple themes to sell to you but I choose to make Marketers Delight the best it can be.

MD4.4.2 reminded me of that because of just how misunderstood and overlooked Markup Schema is in the world of WordPress themes (it was in MD until now). I have a post in mind explaining this more, but yes, your theme absolutely can have an impact in how Google views your site.

From tools that help you design your site to the ones that help you improve the SEO of your site, I want to ensure MD is in the best shape possible for not only my businesses but yours as well.

MD4.4.2 is a reiteration of my commitment to mastering the finer details of your website and I hope you not only appreciate them, but use them wisely to build one hell of an online presence.

See you for the next MD update.