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The hidden schema.org support in TYPO3

Web pages are easy to consume by people. But for machines like search engines, most websites are just unstructured data that is hard to understand.

In 2011, four major search engines (Google, Bing, Yahoo, and Yandex) launched schema.org to create and support a common set of schemas for structured data markup on web pages. Today, schema.org is the most widely used markup for schemas.

Enriching your website with schema.org markup enables you to describe the meaning of a web page for search engines. Search engines use this information to gain a better understanding of the web page's meaning and to create "rich snippets" in search results.

From a SEO perspective, schema.org markup becomes more and more relevant, affecting the position in search results [1].

TYPO3 CMS has a built-in support for schema.org since version 4.7 [2]. Unfortunately, this feature is one of the few hidden spots in TYPO3 documentation. Therefore, we would like to introduce it to you in this post.

To activate the micro-format tagging in the Rich Text Editor (RTE) you need to extend your TSConfig with the following configuration.

TSConfig

Then the following two buttons are displayed in the RTE.

By clicking the "show microdata" button you can turn on and off the annotation view.

You can annotate a text like this:

Select a text and then click the "edit element" button.

A dialog window will open where you can define an item type.

At the moment annotation is only possible on the top level. You can select the schema type like “Organization” but you can not set attributes like the organization’s name. This allows only specifying the element’s type but it does not allow you to link up data. TYPO3 should definitely work on this because schema annotation is becoming more and more popular and is already used by services like Google.

Alternatively, you can do additional schema markup in the source code mode of RTE.

Finally, you can test your markup with the "Google Test Tool for Structured Data" [4].

Conclusion

We have seen that TYPO3 already has a native support for schema.org.

For additional annotation, you can use the HTML Source Code Mode in RTE.

Structured data will become even more important in our strongly connected world. They will not only help to share information between different services more easily but will also add context to data.

There are some TYPO3 extensions in TER that add schema.org support to TYPO3. Some of them we would like to evaluate in a forthcoming post.

P.S.: With the release of TYPO3 CMS 8.5 [3] it is possible to use CKEditor instead of RTE. The microdata feature is currently not available in CKEditor.

References

[1] https://moz.com/learn/seo/schema-structured-data
[2] https://typo3.org/download/release-notes/typo3-47-release-notes/
[3] https://typo3.org/news/article/typo3-v85-released/
[4] https://search.google.com/structured-data/testing-tool