A step-by-step guide to automating Blog Posting JSON-LD generation in Umbraco Headless CMS.

Introduction

The structured data is essentially the most important part of the modern SEO. The search engines rely heavily on schema mark-up to understand the content, identify and understand the relationships between the entities and deliver seamless search experience. But implementing and maintaining schema manually is often very difficult especially for the organizations that manage large content libraries.

Here the auto generated schema becomes a game changer.

If you are the one who doesn't understand what auto generated schema is, this is for you. The auto generated schema is the process of automatically generating structured data from the content that is already present in a CMS. The CMS automatically generates and updates schema when content is published, not having the need of editors to manually maintain JSON-LD.

The teams using Umbraco Headless CMS, implementing an auto generated schema eliminates the SEO maintenance while ensuring every blog post contains accurate structured data at all times.

How Techxot helped

Techxot team recently implemented an auto generated and synchronized schema for Umbraco every time the content is published for our client. Let’s get a deep dive into understanding how this whole project was implemented.

The Issues with The Manual Schema Management

Even though majority of the organizations understand the importance of schema markups, keeping them updated is a big challenge.

Structured data is not visible to the website visitors; this the editors often forget to maintain it. When a schema is added at an initial stage, it becomes outdated as content evolves in future.

Manual schema management has to deal with issues like:

• Author change

• Featured images get replaced

• Schema becomes stale

• URLs are modified

• Manual schema doesn't scale

• Content structures evolve

Schema and content tend to fall out of sync over time when not updated. If an organization publishes hundreds of articles maintaining manual structured data will not scale.

The only solution to this problem is automation.

Our Headless Architecture we worked with

The headless architecture is built with:

• Umbraco 17.4 LTS

• .NET 10

• Next.js frontend

• Vercel hosting

• Umbraco Content Delivery API

• Umbraco Cloud

When we started, we had an important observation, every piece of information required to create a Blog posting schema already existed in the CMS were:

• Blog title

• Description

• Author

• Featured image

• Publication date

• URL

Now we decided to generate schema automatically every time the blog was published, instead of adding more SEO fields.

How To Leverage Umbraco’s Event-Driven Architecture

Umbraco is embraced with the biggest strength that is its notification systems. When in Umbraco content is created, updated, published or deleted a notification is raised, for developers to intercept.

We used the following for our implementation:

This handler is registered from a composer:

This ensured us with a reliable way to execute custom code immediately after content was published.

What Publishing Workflows We Followed?

The schema generation follows simple and straightforward sequence:

• Editors click Save & Publish

• Umbraco initiates the database transaction

• The ContentPublishedNotification is raised

• The handler identifies blog content

• Now the Blog posting JSON-LD is generated

• A background task is started

• The publish transaction commits

• Schema is written back to the database

The result to this workflow is a completely automated publishing workflow, where schema generation becomes the crucial part of content lifecycle.

Introduction

The structured data is essentially the most important part of the modern SEO. The search engines rely heavily on schema mark-up to understand the content, identify and understand the relationships between the entities and deliver seamless search experience. But implementing and maintaining schema manually is often very difficult especially for the organizations that manage large content libraries.

Here the auto generated schema becomes a game changer.

If you are the one who doesn't understand what auto generated schema is, this is for you. The auto generated schema is the process of automatically generating structured data from the content that is already present in a CMS. The CMS automatically generates and updates schema when content is published, not having the need of editors to manually maintain JSON-LD.

The teams using Umbraco Headless CMS, implementing an auto generated schema eliminates the SEO maintenance while ensuring every blog post contains accurate structured data at all times.

How Techxot helped

Techxot team recently implemented an auto generated and synchronized schema for Umbraco every time the content is published for our client. Let’s get a deep dive into understanding how this whole project was implemented.

The Issues with The Manual Schema Management

Even though majority of the organizations understand the importance of schema markups, keeping them updated is a big challenge.

Structured data is not visible to the website visitors; this the editors often forget to maintain it. When a schema is added at an initial stage, it becomes outdated as content evolves in future.

Manual schema management has to deal with issues like:

• Author change

• Featured images get replaced

• Schema becomes stale

• URLs are modified

• Manual schema doesn't scale

• Content structures evolve

Schema and content tend to fall out of sync over time when not updated. If an organization publishes hundreds of articles maintaining manual structured data will not scale.

The only solution to this problem is automation.

Our Headless Architecture we worked with

The headless architecture is built with:

• Umbraco 17.4 LTS

• .NET 10

• Next.js frontend

• Vercel hosting

• Umbraco Content Delivery API

• Umbraco Cloud

When we started, we had an important observation, every piece of information required to create a Blog posting schema already existed in the CMS were:

• Blog title

• Description

• Author

• Featured image

• Publication date

• URL

Now we decided to generate schema automatically every time the blog was published, instead of adding more SEO fields.

How To Leverage Umbraco’s Event-Driven Architecture

Umbraco is embraced with the biggest strength that is its notification systems. When in Umbraco content is created, updated, published or deleted a notification is raised, for developers to intercept.

We used the following for our implementation:

This handler is registered from a composer:

This ensured us with a reliable way to execute custom code immediately after content was published.

What Publishing Workflows We Followed?

The schema generation follows simple and straightforward sequence:

• Editors click Save & Publish

• Umbraco initiates the database transaction

• The ContentPublishedNotification is raised

• The handler identifies blog content

• Now the Blog posting JSON-LD is generated

• A background task is started

• The publish transaction commits

• Schema is written back to the database

The result to this workflow is a completely automated publishing workflow, where schema generation becomes the crucial part of content lifecycle Read more