The Best Alternative to Yoast SEO for 2021

March 25, 2021Updated on April 27, 2021 JS Morisset Schema, SEO, WPSSO Core, Yoast SEO

The Yoast SEO plugin is currently active on over 5 million sites, which means that its features are also limited by the most common and basic needs of those 5 million site owners — content creators and SEO experts often require more control and fine-tuning than Yoast SEO can deliver.

Before considering any Yoast SEO alternative or enhancement plugins, we should clarify what Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is, how a plugin like Yoast SEO helps, and how an alternative plugin like WPSSO Core and its add-ons differ from Yoast SEO.

Shipping Delivery Time for Google Rich Results

October 28, 2020Updated on April 9, 2021 JS Morisset Rich Cards, Schema, WooCommerce, WPSSO Core

In September 2020, Google announced support for shipping details in Schema Product Offers and how shipping details would be presented in search results. Adding the new shippingDetails property to your Schema Product markup is especially important if you offer free or low-cost shipping, as this will make your products more appealing in search results.

In October, Surnia Ulula announced support for shipping details in the WPSSO Core Premium plugin, to provide both the Google recommended Schema OfferShippingDetails shippingDestination and shippingRate properties for WooCommerce products. Although these two properties are enough to satisfy Google’s recommended shipping details markup, the Google validator now warns that an additional deliveryTime property is recommended.

The deliveryTime property should be a Schema ShippingDeliveryTime type that includes businessDays, cutoffTime, handlingTime, and transitTime properties. The data for these four properties can be managed with a new WPSSO Shipping Delivery Time for WooCommerce add-on.

Google Shipping Details for WooCommerce Products

October 3, 2020Updated on April 9, 2021 JS Morisset Schema, SEO, WooCommerce, WPSSO Core, WPSSO JSON

WPSSO Core Premium can now retrieve shipping information for WooCommerce products, including shipping zones, methods, rates, and locations (continents, countries, states, and postal / zip codes). If you’re using postal / zip code wildcards or ranges for shipping, WPSSO Core Premium can also create the proper PostalCodeRangeSpecification markup suggested by Google.

A Better ‘pre_get_posts’ Search for WooCommerce

May 15, 2020Updated on April 9, 2021 JS Morisset WooCommerce, WPSSO WCMD

I recently wrote a plugin to provide missing GTIN, GTIN-8, GTIN-12 (UPC), GTIN-13 (EAN), GTIN-14, ISBN, MPN, Depth, and Volume values for WooCommerce Products and Variations. As part of that plugin, I extended the WordPress search feature to search metadata from WooCommerce products (and their variations). The standard way to extend the WordPress search feature is to hook the “pre_get_posts” action and modify the WP_Query to include additional posts / products in search results. There are some serious drawbacks to doing this – with or without WooCommerce – but especially with WooCommerce.

GTIN, UPC, EAN, ISBN, MPN for WooCommerce

May 3, 2020Updated on March 11, 2021 JS Morisset WooCommerce, WPSSO Core, WPSSO WCMD

There are several ways to create additional product information in WooCommerce – the most common is by creating Product Attributes, either as an Attribute taxonomy term or individually for each product, and then using those Product Attributes for variations. This is great for selectable variation attributes like Color, Size, etc., but does not work well for unique / singular information like GTIN, UPC, EAN, ISBN, and MPN (Manufacturer Part Number). What is required instead is a different way to manage this unique / singular information on the product editing page, which is then shown on the WooCommerce purchase page under the “Additional information” tab.

Google Schema for COVID-19 and More Free Features!

March 31, 2020Updated on March 11, 2021 JS Morisset Schema, SEO, WPSSO Core, WPSSO JSON

On March 17th 2020, in response to COVID-19 self-isolation trends, Google published new Schema Event properties for virtual, postponed, and cancelled events.

The latest Premium version of WPSSO Schema JSON-LD Markup provides several customization options for these new Schema Event properties in the Document SSO metabox.

This past month, the Free / Standard versions of WPSSO Core and its WPSSO Schema JSON-LD Markup add-on have also received several new features — most notably, almost all customization options in the Document SSO metabox are now available in the Free / Standard version of WPSSO Core (except those options that require an integration feature in the Premium version to implement, like the video service APIs), and the Free / Standard version of WPSSO Schema JSON-LD Markup now includes all 495 supported Schema types!

LinkedIn Now Prefers oEmbed Data Instead of Open Graph

September 22, 2019Updated on March 11, 2021 JS Morisset oEmbed, Open Graph, WPSSO Core

When you share a URL on a social site like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc., that social site crawls the webpage in background to read the meta tags and structured data markup (aka Open Graph meta tags, Twitter Card meta tags, Schema JSON-LD, Schema microdata, etc.).

Social sites like LinkedIn generally require an image, a title, and a description to display a share. A few social sites like Pinterest and Twitter can also display additional information for products, recipes, mobile apps, videos, and more.

Until recently, the LinkedIn crawler read only Open Graph meta tags to get the webpage image, title, and description, but recently they’ve started reading oEmbed data as well, and if oEmbed data is available, LinkedIn prefers those values over the Open Graph values.

Google Limits ‘aggregateRating’ and ‘review’ Properties

September 18, 2019Updated on March 11, 2021 JS Morisset Schema, WPSSO JSON

Google has recently updated their Review snippet structured data guidelines to limit the Schema ‘aggregateRating’ and ‘review’ properties to only a select handful of approved Schema types.

The upcoming release of the WPSSO JSON v2.10.0 add-on will follow these new Review snippet structured data guidelines, instead of conforming to the official Schema standard, as the current version does.

If you notice a “not a known valid target type for the itemReviewed property” error in Google structured data validator results, the ‘aggregateRating’ and/or ‘review’ may be included in a non-approved Schema type.