Google's Rich Snippets

Almost  2 years ago, Google announced Rich Snippets, making it possible to structure specific data to be displayed on Google’s search results pages.  It’s been getting a lot of love lately, because local search has become so important and Rich Snippets are very useful for geo-targetted search phrases, such as restaurants and product reviews. There are, however, several types of data that benefit from the use of Rich Snippets, these include:

If your site contains information of these types, then you’ll want to include rich snippet code in your HTML. The code is pretty straightfoward, but can be entered using Microdata, Microformats or RDFa code. For this example, I’ll use Microdata rich snippets. Let’s say we want our products to show up in search results pages displaying an aggregate of the reviews left for the product, as well as the price and the item stock status. In the code, you’ll notice several new elements that call out specified data to be displayed in the search results.Rich Snippets Example

Now let’s take a look at the actual properties within the code:

      1. 1. itemprop=”itemreviewed“: identified the pizza restaurant name that is to show up, followed by the store photo
      2. 2. itemprop=”rating“: calls out for Google to display the ratings about the pizza restaurant
      3. 3. itemprop=”average” and itemprop=”best“: identifies the average rating, to be displayed with star icons
      4. 4. itemprop=”votes” and itemprop=”count“: relays the information about how many votes have been tallied to come up with the rating

Rich Snippet example

As you can see, the code isn’t that difficult, it just requires the correct data being highlighted and clearly defined. Once you’ve added the code to your page, you can check it on Google’s Rich Snippet Testing Tool, where you can see exactly what your page will look like in search results.Google's Rich Snippet Tool

Check out the Rich Snippets Testing  tool here