Reference
What is Schema.org?
Schema.org is the shared vocabulary for structured data, maintained collaboratively by Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and Yandex. It defines the types and properties — Organization, Product, Article — that markup on a page uses to describe itself.
Also called: schema vocabulary
Vocabulary versus format
Schema.org is what you say; JSON-LD is how you write it. The same vocabulary can be expressed as JSON-LD, Microdata or RDFa, and JSON-LD is the format search engines recommend because it survives template changes.
Types worth knowing for a business site
- Organization and Person for who you are
- WebSite and WebPage for the site structure
- Service and Offer for what you sell and at what price
- BreadcrumbList for navigation context
- Article or TechArticle for content, with author and publisher
The part that matters more than type choice
Linking the nodes together with @id references. A perfectly chosen type in an isolated block says far less than a modest type connected into a graph that describes relationships.
Where this is covered in depth
A definition can only go so far. Schema markup that does something, and the kind that risks a penalty covers this properly — 3 minutes, free, no email required.
Who wrote this
Anas Bin Masud builds e-commerce sites and does technical SEO for businesses in the UK, Canada and Pakistan. These definitions come from client work rather than from a content brief — where an entry describes a mistake, it is usually one found on a real site. More about how I work.