What are Google Rich Snippets?
Even if you don’t know what Google Rich Snippets are by name, you will have seen them many times on the Google SERPs when surfing the Internet.
Google Rich Snippets are the additional lines of information which appear next to the Google Search Result and they are designed to provide more quick information for the Internet user about what they will find if they click on the advertisements / listing.
The snippets include star ratings for the web page and other “snippets” of detailed information about specific elements of the web page that they refer to.
Restaurants, music, people, events, videos, recipes, products and businesses are generally the types of websites that are likely to appear with Google Rich Snippets and which really benefit from providing the extra information for Internet users.
How do Google Rich Snippets Help to Increase Click Through Rate?
Google Rich Snippets are simply that… they are snippets of information which tell the Internet user a lot about you or your company in a very short space of time. Having a star rating of 5 in your Google Rich Snippets can be the small edge that you need in order to encourage the Internet user to click on your listing and not on that of a competitor.
Information that is provided as an image is always really easy on the eye. Information is generally digested better online when provided as an image and not as another paragraph of text, no matter how short and well written it is.
This is why the Google Rich Snippets are perfect additions to your online marketing strategy as a whole. If you don’t yet have yours, follow the steps below in order to get things in motion.
How can you get your Google Rich Snippets?
Google, in most cases, will automatically generate your rich snippets for you, particularly if your site has been around for a long time and there is a lot of data that Google can use to generate the snippets accurately.
However, if you see that your website listings are appearing in the Google SERPs without any snippets alongside them, there are certain things you can do in order to put your Google Rich Snippets into action.
- Choose a markup format for your site. You can choose between Microdata, Microformats and RDFa.
- Make sure that you use meta tags in your content to give descriptive names to text.
- Follow this link http://www.google.com/
webmasters/tools/richsnippets and check to see whether your content is being picked up by Google in the way it needs to be read for rich snippets to start appearing automatically. - Smile proudly as you see your Google Rich Snippets appearing alongside all of your SERP listings when you browse via your keywords.
