April 16, 2013 by akhilendra

What are Rich Snippets – Use Structured Data For Rich SEO

Sharing is Caring

It’s been a while since rich snippets has been displayed in SERPs and they are fairly popular. Click through rate is better for results with rich snippets and they also look attractive. Do you want your picture to be displayed along with the rich snippets in the search results? If yes, then you can verify your authorship in order to do that.

Rich snippets also contribute to search engine rankings, so they are good for SEO also. In fact, in current world it is imperative to focus on rich snippets.

What are Rich Snippets?

Rich snippets are page markup. They are type of structured data. In short, rich snippet is the little description of your post/page with additional data like review stars in search results. With the addition of these review stars and google authorship, you can significantly improve your search engine rankings and click through rates.

It has been proved that rich snippets do add great value to your blog and its content.

Rich snippets have been exceptionally helpful in drawing user attention and as user is targeted, it also helps in reduced bounce rate.

Just look at some of the Rich Snippet Examples;

How Rich Snippets work?

Google need structured data in order to create rich snippets for your post. You can help google understand your content and create these rich snippets.

Type of structured data;

Schema.org
Microformats
Microdata
RDFa
Data extracted by data highlighter

Google currently support rich snippet for following type of data;

Reviews
People
Products
Business and organizations
Recipes
Events
Music
Authors with profile photo

How to create rich snippets for your blog

I have used SEOPressor plugin to create rich snippet for my wordpress based blog. You just have to enter the information in the given field and it will create rich snippet for you.

You can also verify google authorship using this awesome plugin.

SEOPressor is primarily a on page seo plugin which is best in class. To read about it’s features and benefits, read SEOPressor Review.

If you are looking to integrate Rich Snippets Code using some other mean, then you need to pick your language. Microformat is the most widely used among webmasters to create rich snippet for their sites but most of the blogger use plugins like SEOpressor to achieve it as it is less cumbersome and quick.

How to Test Rich Snippets

You can use Google webmasters tool to test if rich snippets are working for your site. Simply login to your webmasters account and navigate to other resources under optimization. There you will find rich snippet testing tool.

Google Webmasters> Optimization> Other Resources> Rich Snippet Testing Tool

Conclusion

Structured data and Rich snippet is the future of SERPs. It will decide how information is displayed on search engines. As mentioned earlier, you can use Google Snippet Tool.

Officially it not suppose to make ground breaking difference in SEO but on page seo has become a major factor in search engine rankings and structured data is all about optimizing your content in order to make it more readable for search engines like Google. Therefore it is bound to have positive impact on your rankings, directly or indirectly.

Rich snippets are playing major role in current Google rankings and for most of the queries you run on it, you will find results with Google authorship and rich snippets. It is the biggest evidence of its growing importance.

You should use Google webmasters tool to ensure that your site is compatible and rich snippets along with google authorship is working for your blog. It is essential for bloggers.