Schema Editor – Advanced Guidelines

Let's first start with a notice 😅 . Before actually reading this article, please check the Schema Editor – The basics article that will explain some of the essentials needed for these Schema Guidelines. Without it, you won't be able to understand what am I speaking about here. 😕

Alright, now that we've confirmed that you have the basic knowledge of Schema Editor and how it works, we can move forward and bring attention to some details regarding it. All the chapters inside of this article will explain in more details some of the features that Schema Editor offers to provide customizable schemas for your needs.

As you will figure it out in Chapter 2., schema properties can have different types of property values. These are called data types. In this chapter, we'll list you all the possible data types that currently exist for specific properties in Schema Editor.

- Text (plain text, such as My Address 123)

- URL (absolute path to your website, such as http://mywebsite.com/)

- Time (24 time text in the next format, 17:00:00)

- Date (date in format, 31.12.2012)

- DateTime (date and time in format, 31.12.2012 17:00:00)

- Float (number with a decimal such as, 3.14)

- Integer (a number such as, 20)

- Number (same as integer)

- Schema (covered in Chapter 2.)

These are the all data types that are available per Schema.org directory as of today.

Some of the schema properties can have different types of values in them (data types) and depending of your needs, you can configure them and customize them based on what you want to appear in your schemas.

As you can see in the image above, we have Address property whose values can be two different data types: Text and PostalAddress.

If you set the Text data type, you will be able to insert plain text values, such as My Address 123 and those values will be perfectly valid. But, if you want to provide more information about the Address of your business, you would want to set up the PostalAddress data type which will actually allow you embed the pre-existing PostalAddress schema to Address property.

To explain it simply, properties can sometimes have Schema(s) as their data type and by using them, you are allowed to insert more fields and details depending on your needs.

Let me show you that by creating a new PostalAddress schema and using it as a value inside of our LocalBusinesss schema Address property.

You would normally start to build a PostalAddress schemas as explain the previous article. As this will be only an example, I'll fill out the following properties in this schema:

- Address Locality

- Address Region

- Post Office Box Number

- Postal Code

- Street Address

Of course, you are welcome to fill out this entire schema and all it's properties if you want to provide really descriptive structured data to Google.

Now when we have the PostalAddress schema filled out and ready for saving, I'm going to name it default_PostalAddress and set it to the schema group of my website and press Save Schema.

Notice that I'm putting this schema into the same group where my website's LocalBusiness schema is. This is created in that way because we didn't want you to be confused with all your schemas when picking a schema for your property value.

So, in order to use, for example, PostalAddress schema in Address property, your PostalAddress schema must be in the same group as your, for example, LocalBusiness schema is.

Once all that is done and saved, you can load your previous schema (LocalBusiness) where you have the Address property.

Once you do that, you will notice that the property value text boxes are gone and that there is now a blue button with the Edit icon as seen in the image above.

That button will allow you to search for a PostalAddress schema and assign it to the Address property. 

Click it and the window from above will appear where you will select your newly created PostalAddress schema and press the Select button.

And congratulations, you've successfully set your first property schema data type. 😅

Also, don't forget to press Save Schema in order to save those changes made to your LocalBusiness schema.

All of the properties allow you to set multiple values for them in case you have more than one values that applies to the specific property. The best example for this is the Same As property that basically tells Google what other websites / links are connected with your website (official Facebook pages, Twitter profiles etc.)