When searching the web, search engine results pages (SERPs) traditionally contain three bits of information about a page:
- The page title.
- The description of the page (found within the meta description tag) or an excerpt of the page containing the keywords you searched for.
- The URL of the web page.
In Google’s ongoing pursuit of organizing the world’s information and providing users with a better search experience, they have now introduced even more information into the SERPS – Rich Snippets. So what exactly do these Rich Snippets look like? Before showing you examples of different Google Rich Snippets let’s look at what is required for a specific web page to be ‘rich snippet friendly’.
With rich snippets, webmasters with sites containing structured content—for example, review sites or business listings—can label their content to make it clear that each labeled piece of text represents a certain type of data: for example, a restaurant name, an address, or a rating. This information doesn’t affect the appearance of your content on your own pages, but it does help Google better understand and present information from your page. For example, it can be used to create rich snippets to be displayed on a search results page.
To ensure your site is rich snippet ready all you need to do is use any of the following structured data formats: microdata, microformats, or RDFa. These structured data formats allow machine-readable data to be embedded in HTML documents in an easy-to-write manner. They are designed for humans first and machines second and it will in no way change the look of your web pages, only give machines like Googlebot a better understanding of the data on your web pages. From an SEO perspective this could increase the CTR (Click Through Rate) to your site from the SERPs even though your site may not be first on the page.
Now let’s have a look at various forms of Google Rich Snippets using structured data formats:
Facebook Friends
View a persons Facebook Friends straight from Google SERPs
Reviews and Ratings
Avatar Ratings and Review Rich Snippet
LinkedIn Location and Job Title
LinkedIn Rich Snippet
Implementing structured data into your website will not require learning a new programming language as it uses simple attributes in HTML tags (often <span> or <div>) to assign brief and descriptive names to items and properties. Only a small amount of web development is required to enable your sites to displayed in Google SERPs with rich snippets included.
Its that simple – what are you waiting for?
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