7 Semantic Web Tools for Your Website

As we've covered in the past, incorporating the principles of the semantic web can have huge advantages for your content marketing, local SEO and your online business. But how do you actually “do” the semantic web? What tools exist out there to help you use it?

Wonder no more!

In this post, we've put together 7 great tools you can use to create, validate and add semantic entities to your website.

Create Semantic Markup

Adding semantic markup to connect your content to your entities is the basic building block of the semantic web.

But what if you're not a programmer?

Use these tools to create semantic markup for your site.

WooRank Metadata Tool

Schema metadata is a great way to point search engines and other robots toward your other online profiles:

• Twitter
• Google+
• Facebook
• Foursquare
• Yelp

These can all be source s of data for Google's Knowledge Graph, and many rich snippets will feature links back to the social media profiles that Google can find.

WooRanks' Metadata Tool is a great way to create the markup needed to point crawlers at your social media pages. Just enter your URLs into the appropriate fields and then copy the provided code over to your website.

URLs go in, semantic markup comes out. It's easy, and it's free.

JSON-LD Schema Generator

The Schema Generator from Hall Analysis is another free tool to create semantic markup you can add to your site. The Schema Generator will create the code to context to your site for

• Local businesses
• People
• Products
• Events
• Organization
• Websites

Like with WooRank's Metadata Tool, Schema Generator takes the information you provide and turns it into data structured for machine readability.

Validate Semantic Markup

Once you've tagged your metadata with your markup, you need to validate the code. Validation is an important step – adding broken and incorrect code to your site won't do you any favors, and will likely backfire.

Unless, of course, you used WooRank's Metadata Tool to link your brand with social media profiles. Then you can be confident that it's perfect code.

Google Structured Data Testing Tool

If you're adding semantic markup to help with your SEO, there's no reason not to use Google itself to validate your code. Google's Structured Data Testing Tool works two ways:

1. Copy and paste the code you want to validate into the tool
2. Enter the URL of the page you want to test

Either way, the tools will come back with the entities it detects on the page, and the data it's linked to.

So, for the code created by the WooRank Metadata tool, Google is able to find entities for the organization (in this case, Acme.org) and its blog. The tool also detects the links to the social media profiles.

(See? No errors, no warnings. Perfection.)

Yandex Semantic Markup Validator

This free tool, like Google's tool, examines either your page URL or code snippet and returns the JSON-LD links it's able to read.

Here's an example of what happens when you try to use a field that's not associated with a schema:

Structured Data Linter

There are few things that are different about Structured Data Linter from other semantic markup tools. First, you can upload local files to the validator as well as paste the code or submit a URL.

Second, Linter can construct rich snippets out of the metadata it finds on your page, so you can see your markup in action.

Finally, you've also got programmatic access to Linter, so you don't actually have to manually check pages or code blocks. Linter will return a request with the following information about the page's metadata:

• Snippet: Linter's mockup of the page's rich snippet
• Extracted data: A table of the semantic data Linter is able to detect in the file
• Statistics: Information regarding the snippet templates and parsed triples use
• Debug: “Extensive information” regarding debugging the issues Linter detected while validating the markup

Create, Store and Manage Your Semantic Web

Once you've created and validated your semantic markup, you just need to add it to your website and wait for Google to find and crawl it.

However, semantic markup isn't a ranking factor, and just having code on your pages isn't making full use of the power of the semantic web. To do that, you need to create your own entities and use them to build a semantic web for your website.

WordLift

Wordlift.io is a WordPress plugin for content creators looking to take advantage of the semantic web for their content marketing. Wordlift is powered by its natural language processing (NLP) technology that analyzes text and enriches it with customized semantic markup.

Basically, if you go back to the example we used in part one of our semantic web series, WordLift sees this sentence:

Greg was born in Michigan and I am a resident of Brussels.

And is detects the entities for “Greg”, "Michigan" and "Brussels". It then uses open data sources to markup the page to add context for those entities.

WordLift also lets you create your own entities for your website, and will automatically detect your vocabulary to enrich your content. So this sentence:

Add the location of your xml sitemap to your robots.txt file.

Is enriched by linking to the data for “xml sitemap” and "robots.txt file".

TextRazor

TextRazor is a text analysis and enrichment infrastructure that adds the semantic web to your content. It reads your text, analyzes it, and then adds context to it via linking to relevant sources on the web. You can see a straightforward demo of its analysis at work on their website.

TextRazor also extracts the topical relevance of the entities on the page to broad themes. In the case of their BBC article demo, you can see the entities and topics the article is semantically relevant for.

From an SEO perspective, those are the query themes Google sees that page relevant for. This information is very important when optimizing your on-page content, and should inform the way you build your website's vocabulary. If you've got a page about apples (the fruit), you don't want to somehow write your content so it looks like it's about computers.

Conclusion

The semantic web can be a powerful force for your website's SEO and user experience. However, to truly harness its potential, you need the right semantic web tools. Using the tools listed above, or even some we might have missed, you'll be able to create markup, validate it and add it your site quickly and easily.