Further improve SEO and make the website 5-star Linked Data by integrating also links to other datasets

[SvenLieber]

The newest version of Wochemy (version 5) which I started to use (f468f84), has improved Schema.org annotation due to an integrated Wowchemy-SEO plugin. compared to the very old outdated version I used.

However, even though content is better annotated it can be better. Namely I would consider it 4 star Linked Data, but I would like to have 5 star Linked Data: linking to other Linked Data datasets in the web such as Wikidata.

[SvenLieber]

Preliminary analysis

The following partials create JSON-LD for the different website pages (main page, articles, blog posts, events): https://github.com/wowchemy/wowchemy-hugo-themes/tree/main/modules/wowchemy-seo/layouts/partials/jsonld

Those partials have access to the variables of the page front matter (via $page.Params), I couldn't access the site variables.
Following the Hugo template lookup order, I can copy the existing partials into layouts/partials/jsonld and maintain there a local adapted copy which I have to maintain and adapt for future theme updates.

Possible solution

I could add more metadata to the existing author list variable of a page frontmatter, but this would cause compatibility issues with future theme versions as I would change a core variable of the theme which is used by several templates of the theme. Currently it is simply a list of names, if I would convert it to a list of dictionaries or something similar, I would have to adapt all templates using the author metadata.

It is better to define my own variables in a page frontmatter apart and adapt the existing partials to iterate over that data structure. This has the advantage that I do not change a core variable of the theme and only adapt a few partial templates. One disadvantage, due to the missing access possibility of the page scope, is that I would have to define author metadata on each and every page, but often I have the same co-authors for several publications (thus I would have to copy/paste a lot of data).

According to Google, there should not be structured data which is not visible in one way or another to a human user.

• Rich metadata for main website (sameas links are already shown with icons)
• Rich metadata for articles
  • Rich JSON-LD for authors
  • Rich JSON-LD for the article
  • Add clickable sameas links
• Rich metadata for events
  • Rich JSON-LD for authors
  • Rich JSON-LD for events (including using schema:VirtualLocation for online events, as shown in the docs: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/appearance/structured-data/event)
  • Add clickable sameas links
• Rich JSON-LD for project overview page (all my projects are external, thus I do not have explicit pages per project, e.g. with https://schema.org/ItemList)
• Rich metadata for blog posts
  • Rich JSON-LD for authors
  • Rich JSON-LD for the post
  • Add clickable sameas links
• Rich JSON-LD for publication overview page (e.g. with https://schema.org/ItemList)

For the clickable links for the page itself I can add buttons as they already exist in the template, for other things on the page, for example for authors, I can add small icons next to it, for example like Orcid icons in academic publications.

Example of Orcid logo use on the SWIB 22 website: https://swib.org/swib22/programme.html

<p><a href="speakers.html#Xf9bdbdfd09c9a3ccc868ea7872a9b2be201cd7f4a0b9ea3c79820f6e35fea180">Sven Lieber</a> <a href="https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7304-3787"><img src="images/orcid.png" title="ORCID: 0000-0002-7304-3787"></a>, Ann Van Camp <a href="https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1915-5956"><img src="images/orcid.png" title="ORCID: 0000-0002-1915-5956"></a>, Hannes Lowagie <a href="https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0671-3568"><img src="images/orcid.png" title="ORCID: 0000-0002-0671-3568"></a></p>

[SvenLieber]

I got the used Orcid color from their brand guidelines: https://info.orcid.org/brand-guidelines/#h-orcid-logos-and-icons