Have you ever seen the date of a post in search results? Yes, that’s also done with Structured Data. Here is how it works.

Last month Google wrote a blog post about how the search engine determines dates from blog posts (and other pages). Here is how you can do that with SNIP, the Structured Data Plugin for WordPress:

A) Show a date anywhere in your post

The first thing you should do is to make sure that the date of the current post is visible to the user. This should be an easy one because most themes are showing the dates on posts. If not there is normally an option in the theme settings that allow you to show the dates to the end user.

B) Add Structured Data

Almost every child schema from CreativeWork supports the datePublished and dateModified properties. For example the Article, NewsArticle, Blog, etc.. All you need to do is to add those properties to your schema.

If you’re working with Global Snippets in SNIP, search for datePublished and dateModified and fill the properties with their values

Of course you should automate as much as possible. That’s why SNIP allows you to select the dates that WordPress stores in its database internally. So the plugin can fetch it from there for you. No need to add dates manually! 😉