Create Effective How-to Pages Easily With Schema Markup plugins

Are you looking for ways to incorporate how-to pages into your WordPress website? Then you have landed in the right place!

While competing in the same niche, it is hard to grab visitors’ attention on the search result pages. And how-to pages do that for you. These pages carry all the useful information in a very concise manner and engage the reader throughout the blog.

Now, there are two ways to create a how-to page: manually or using Schema markup plugins. You can opt for any method. However, the schema markup plugin gives it a competitive edge over the manual way.

Using schema, you can add attributes like name, image, duration, star rating, description, time duration, and more to your how-to blog. Moreover, it also boosts your SEO by letting search engines better understand your content. This way, when a visitor’s eye falls on it, it immediately increases the likelihood of clicking that page. Thus, driving more traffic to your site will fulfill its purpose.

And this is just the beginning.

In this article, we will outline the key benefits of an SEO-optimised WordPress schema markup plugin and later show you how to create effective how-to pages easily using the schema markup plugin.

So without further ado, let’s get started!

Things to consider while creating a how-to schema page

Firstly, it is important to understand that every page of your website serves a different purpose. For example, the contact page allows customers to contact you; the home page provides a brief overview of your site; the FAQ page answers frequently asked questions; and the how-to page is dedicated to providing a detailed overview of any topic.

So, if it is built creatively and thoughtfully, there is a good chance that it will direct readers to your other blogs or even lead them to purchase your services. So, don’t let this opportunity go out of your hands and consider the following aspects while creating the how-to page:

• Understand why your reader is here: When a visitor lands on the how-to page, try to provide the best experience for them in terms of the quality of your content and easy navigation. Ask yourself, “Is your page providing the relevant information and sufficient enough to satisfy the customer’s purpose?”
• Structure your content: Well-planned and neat content is easy to read and engages the readers for a long time. Make sure you divide the content into several sections with a clear vision. And add links only if needed (don’t push them).
• Optimize to the greatest extent possible: Since the rich snippets will appear in search results. In order to make it eye-catching, add the meta title and the description.
• Add different attributes to rich snippets: Your site will only be visible to visitors for a fraction of a second. So, make sure you integrate all necessary attributes into rich snippets according to the topic. For example, if it’s a recipe, consider adding customer reviews, duration, and ingredients. Or if it’s technical content, then you can add images or videos to make it more engaging.
• Keep a close eye on details: Always, always pay closer attention to your how-to page, especially from the reader’s point of view. Understand the end result they want from your page. Because if anything goes wrong and they lose interest in you, you will miss the golden opportunity of increasing your engagement rate and might even have potential sales.

So, now that you know the factors you need to consider when creating a how-to schema page, let’s jump into an overview of schema markup and how you can implement it in how-to pages.

What is schema markup?

Schema markup, or structured data, is a code that is easily understood by search engines, which results in rich snippets in the search engine results.

What does that mean?

This means that search engines interpret website data differently than humans do. What we see as the sentences are displayed in the form of an entity-relation graph on major search engines like Google, Bing, and others.

This allows them to navigate your website’s information, gain a better understanding of it, and connect the dots. Thus, resulting in rich snippets of information in SERPs and improving the CTR of your webpage.

Following are the summarised benefits of using the schema markup language on your website:

• Helping search engines to better understand your website’s content and the services you offer in any form.
• Boost your brand’s presence online with a full-proof knowledge graph. For example, you can display your company’s name and all relevant information on the right side of the search engine, similar to how it appears in the business listing.
• In the search results, include enticing rich snippets.
• Increases your site’s CTR and organic traffic.

Get acquainted with schema.org

Schema.org, a website that lets you embed schemas, offers more than 797 types of schemas and 1453 schema properties. You can incorporate the concept into your website as per the concept.

For beginners or non-coders, it might seem puzzling and overwhelming. So, let us brief it in more simple terms.

The entire schema hierarchy consists of two terms: type and attribute. Each type has several attributes or a certain set of predefined properties that further describe the content of your page.

The screenshot below shows an example of a how-to schema type with the related attributes that perfectly define the webpage content in blocks.

How to create effective how-to pages for your WordPress website?

While creating the how-to schema pages for your WordPress website, there are two ways:

By manually adding the how-to schema from the schema.org

If you are looking for building how-to pages using schema markup without investing a single penny, then you can follow the manual approach. However, creating a manual how-to schema page takes a long time and requires a basic understanding of web development skills.

Below are the steps for creating a how-to page for your WP website:

• Open the Google Structured Data Markup Helper, a tool that will help you to create schema markups according to your how-to post/ page content. This will show you different types of data types such as articles, products, events, movies, TV Episodes, and more. Select the data type, add the URL in the below field, and click on “Start Tagging”.

• Next, start tagging the content sections.

As an example seen in the screenshot below, the tagged data items will be seen on the right-hand side of the window. 

After tagging all the data items, click on “Create HTML”.

• There you have the schema markup of your how-to page in two formats: JSON-LD and Microdata. You can switch to one another by clicking on the “JSON-LD” tab.

Furthermore, download the HTML file of your schema markup to integrate the code into your WP website section block.

Or you can continue by clicking on the “Finish” button. This is followed by a series of steps.

• And the final step is to validate your how-to schema page. For this, go to Structured Data Testing Tool. Enter your website’s URL if it’s a CMS or the source code otherwise. And finally, test it.

So, this is how you manually create a how-to schema page. Now, we will share some words about the schema markup plugins.

By using the WordPress schema markup plugin

While manually creating a how-to schema markup page can save you money, at the same time it demands some professional skills and consumes a considerable amount of time. This is where the WordPress schema markup plugins step in.

They are highly effective, come with additional features such as SEO optimization, and are easy to use. There are plenty of schema markup plugins available in the WordPress repository, such as Schema Pro, All-in-one-SEO, and others. If interested, you can choose from one of them depending on your needs and budget.

Besides the plugin you choose, here are the benefits of using it:

• Get rid of the manual implementation and automate everything.
• Buys yourself more time which you utilize in the other tasks.
• No coding skills are required, just a basic understanding of WP would be sufficient.
• Measure your efforts on the go, which means, you can monitor the impact of how-to schema in real time.
• Build the SEO-optimized how-to page for your website and shine in the SERPs.

Final Words

In the era of advanced technologies and cut-throat competition, it is important to adopt cutting-edge strategies to rank higher in search engine result pages. And building an effective how-to schema page does that for you.

However, there are some things to consider while building these pages, as mentioned above, that you should not overlook. And provide readers with only the relevant information they need without going vague.

So we’re left with the final piece of advice. Always try to build your webpage using the schema markup (manually or using a plugin, it’s your call). They not only let you make reader-friendly pages but also help you boost your SEO and contribute to driving sales. In short, try to take the most leverage out of it and build the best business possible.