Whether you’re looking for the hottest rich snippet techniques, or just wondering ‘what exactly is a rich snippet anyway,’ this blog will teach you a thing or two about this hot technique. While Rich Snippets are not necessarily required for your website, they will bring noticeable benefits to your visibility and search engine rankings when used well.
What are rich snippets?
The term “rich snippets” is used to describe structured data mark-up that can be added to HTML in order to make it easier for search engines to understand the content on each web page. What’s more, most major search engines now use this mark-up to present results more suited to search queries, making it very useful in Search Engine Optimisation.
Effective use of rich snippets can benefit search engines, users and site operators by making the content of your pages more apparent to search engines. With rich snippets:
- Search engines can return more relevant results
- Users are better able to determine the relevance of search results, often on the results page
- Your website will benefit from increased traffic and lower bounce rates because it’s more obvious what kind of content your site has.
How to add rich snippets to a website:
One of the easiest ways to add rich snippets to your website is by using Google’s Structured Data Markup Helper, an easy-to-use tool released by the search engine giant. By following the instructions within the online helper, you’ll create a customised HTML schema markup which you can insert into your webpage for simple rich snippets.
Alternatively, if your site used WordPress, you can use one of the many plugins designed to help implement rich snippets, such as the All In One Schema.org Rich Snippets plugin. Open the plugin tab from your dashboard, and you’ll be able to implement schema markups in no time!
How to write rich snippets:
When writing rich snippets for your site, remember that you’re essentially writing a description of the section you are marking up for the search engine. Make sure to write what an element is, the type of element and a description in your markup.
Rich snippets (or structured data markup) use three primary elements, which are:
- Itemscope – This specifies that the HTML contained in the <div> block refers to an item
- Itemtype – Indicates what kind of item that is
- Itemprop – This is the specific property, such as the name, URL, review, etc.
When to use rich snippets:
While rich snippets don’t have to be added to all the content properties on your site, having more content marked up will help search engines present results more accurately. You should also remember to only markup visible content – not hidden page elements and so on – as applying rich snippets to this content may adversely affect your search engine rankings.
As well as product listings (as in the previous example), rich snippets can be especially effective when applied to:
- Reviews – Both individual and aggregate scores are supported
- People – Supported properties include name, title, role and contact details
- Products – With rich snippets, you can list the product name, image, brand, reviews and more
- Organisations – You can markup the name, address, phone number, logo and more.
- Recipes – With rich snippets, you can include the type of dish, reviews, cooking time and even nutritional information like calories, serving size and more
- Events – Useful for promoting future events, you can include the event’s official name, start/end date, duration, location and more
- Music – Google allows for rich snippets relating to preview links, song titles, lyrics, etc.
- Videos – This applies to embedded videos on your site, and can indicate fields like duration, licence, creator of the video and so on.
Hopefully, these explanations are enough to get you excited for rich snippets and eager to categorise your whole site for easy searches and better rankings in the future. Which brings us neatly to our next point:
What to Expect After Implementing Rich Snippets?
The short answer is – unfortunately – not much, at least at first. Rich snippets are more of a privilege than a right and may take several days to show any obvious effects, even if you did everything right when you implemented them.
Many search engines – especially Google – start to analyse the new markup roughly 10 days after you add it to your site. If everything appears correct, they will then start to display rich snippets on the Search Engine Results Pages.
All this takes time and any tweaks to your markup may start the vetting process anew, so your best bet is to implement the markup as best you can, then wait and see. For more tips on rich snippets, organic SEO techniques or web design, contact us today!