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How to use Google Data Highlighter in 6 simple steps

Google Data Highlighter is an easy to use tool from Google for marking up your site’s data (teaching Google the pattern of structured data on your site). This post focuses on how to use it to mark up your website content in 6 simple steps.

Step 1:

Log in to your Google Search Console and click on “Data Highlighter” under “Search Appearance” (see image below).

Step 2:

Click on the ‘Start Highlighting’ button beside the video to get a URL box like this

In the URL box, enter your site’s URL (URL of the site you wish to mark up).

Note: this URL must be entered the same way it appears in your search console else you will get an error message similar to this.

Step 3:

In the drop-down list, select the content type you are wish to mark up. Available types include:

Articles, Book Reviews, Events, Local Businesses, Movies, Products, Restaurants, Software Applications and TV Episodes

Step 4:

Select whether to “Tag this page and others like it” or “Tag just this page”.

Step 5:

If you don’t have any errors, start marking up elements such as name, author, contact details, product description etc.

Step 6:

Cross check to confirm that everything is as it should be in the right-hand navigation and hit “publish”.