Adding structured data with Perl

If you have a website, then it’s very likely that you would like as many people as possible to see it. One of the best tools for achieving that is to ensure that your site is returned close to the top of as many search results pages as possible.

The second item on the list is mostly about getting other websites on the same topic to link to you – and it is outside the scope of this post. In this post, I want to talk about a good way to ensure search engines know what your site is about.

Of course, the search engines have invested a lot of money in working that out for themselves. They scan the text on your site and processes it to extract the meaning. But there are various ways you can make it easier for them. And they like sites that make their lives easier.

One of the most powerful ways to achieve this is to add structured data to your site. That means adding extra mark-up to your web pages which explains what the page is about. On the Schema.org website, you can find dozens of “things” the you can describe in structured data – for example, here is the definition of the Person entity. Each entity has a number of (largely optional) properties which can be included in structured data about an object of that type. Each property can be a string or another structured data entity. Additionally, entities are arranged in a hierarchy, so one entity can be based on another, more generic, entity. A Person, for example, inherits all of the properties of a Thing (which is the most generic type of entity). This is a lot like inheritance in Object-Oriented Programming.

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