subject: Rich Snippets - Are They Relevant To Your Website? [print this page] Rich Snippets - Are They Relevant To Your Website?
You may have heard of Rich Snippets' for websites but not be sure of how they work, or where the value rests. First introduced in May 2009, Rich Snippets were initially created for reviews and people profiles. In addition to these things, Rich Snippets can also be used with events, products, videos, recipes and business listings. Chances are you have seen Rich Snippets in the search results without realising that is what they are shown as light grey or as a star rating (if it is a review), between the hyperlink and the short description in search results.
Rich Snippets can help users make a decision from the search results page as to whether or not they want to find out more by clicking through to that website. If your website offers information such as: Events, Products, Business Listings, Recipes, Reviews, Videos and/or Profiles, you can ask you webmaster to utilise Rich Snippets.
For the non technical minded, Rich Snippets make it possible to label these pieces of information (as listed above) within the website source code (using Microdata, Microformat or RDFa formats) to show Google that this information represents a certain type of data. You can verify that you have entered the code correctly within your site using the Rich Snippets Testing Tool offered by Google.
Utilising Rich Snippets on your website helps to inform Google exactly what it is that you offer their searchers. You are helping Google's search robots to better recognise and display your information in the search results, therefore showing more relevant information to match a user's search query.
Being able to offer organised and optimised data for the Search Engines to crawl and index enables you to enhance the display of your site in the natural search results. This alone could help to improve the natural click through rate for your site.
Referring to the recent Google Places listings changes and the way that search results are now showing for local searches, with Place Search listings now showing in the top of the search results - it is extremely valuable that website owners and webmasters make the most of Rich Snippets within their websites to ensure that they are providing the most information that they can about their products and/or services and what it is that they have to offer the user.
Don't miss out on local search opportunities for your website because information related to events, products, videos, recipes and/or business listings isn't clearly displayed in the search results.
Google Places pages often show references to particular businesses from other websites, but for Google to be able to find these pages they need to be able to understand your reference to the site and that is where structured Rich Snippets markup comes in.
Instead of utilising strings of unstructured text on your website, which Google does not recognise assist them by inserting Rich Snippets and give your website structured content and informative information to display in the search results.
