Does my website need schema markup?

It is not a ranking factor, and it is worth adding. Structured data removes ambiguity about who you are and what you sell, which is what makes rich results possible and what answer engines increasingly parse in preference to guessing from prose.

Do FAQ rich results still work?

Not for most sites. Google restricted FAQ rich results to authoritative government and health sites in 2023 and has not reversed it. The markup is still worth shipping, because Q&A pairs are the cleanest extractable format for AI answer engines.

What is a canonical tag for?

A canonical tag tells search engines which URL is the preferred version when the same content is reachable at several addresses. It consolidates ranking signals onto the URL you nominate, rather than letting the engine choose for you.

SEO

What is JSON-LD and why is it preferred?

JSON-LD is a block of JSON inside a script tag describing what a page is about. Google recommends it over Microdata and RDFa because it sits apart from the visible markup, so a design change cannot silently break it.

Answered by Anas Bin Masud 154 words 3 sections

Why format choice matters

Microdata is woven through the HTML as attributes. When someone restructures a template, the markup breaks and nobody notices because nothing looks different. JSON-LD is self-contained, reviewable and far more durable.

Getting the shape right

One script tag containing one @graph array
Every node given an @id, so others can reference it
References written as bare { "@id": "..." } objects
Absolute URLs matching your canonical exactly
Validated with both the Schema Markup Validator and the Rich Results Test

Range errors validators forgive

email must be Text — a mailto: prefix makes consumers emit mailto:mailto:. primaryImageOfPage accepts only ImageObject. telephone should be E.164 everywhere. dateModified must reflect content, not the deploy.

The longer version

This answer is deliberately short. If you want the full treatment, Schema markup that does something, and the kind that risks a penalty covers it in about 3 minutes — free, ungated, written from client work.

Who answered this

Anas Bin Masud builds e-commerce sites and does technical SEO for businesses in the UK, Canada and Pakistan — fifteen live client sites, six of them stores taking real payments. These answers come from those projects rather than from a content brief. More about how I work, or ask me something directly.