Rich Snippets provide a small sample of a site’s content on Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs) for search engines such as Google, Yahoo and Bing. They enhance your search listing, making it more enticing for users to click on and easier for search engines to extract information. – Julien Simon, 6S Marketing
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Often times when it comes to the issue of fixing a website so that it perform better on search, we tend to focus on the site itself. Accessibility, user experience, cleaning up navigation, the list goes on. But there are things that we can do outside of the aesthetics on a website, which can encourage more searchers to click to visit and stick around. For example, just think about the layout of the Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs) after you ask a question on Google or Bing. Wouldn’t you want to control the way your website appears there as well to encourage more visitors?
The Advantage of Schema and Rich Snippets
If your business website has target prices, dates, events, rankings, and/or a brand name, then using Schema markup will help you to influence rich snippets and display these elements right up front on the SERP’s. A site that implements rich snippets has a lot of visual cues. You’ve seen it before, since it’s designed to to draw eyes and offers a quick impression of available offerings prior to visiting a website. It may have gold stars displayed to show that it’s loved, the current price for key products, and even the hours that the store is for customers interested in coming to visit.
These things are the result of good markup on a website. Google has enabled this feature for webmasters to take advantage of, and anyone that knows HTML will be able to do it.
An Example of Rich Snippets:
How to Use Schema
Schema.org is the source for schema markup. It’s a site loaded with examples and code for us to use on our own websites to display relevant information. Most of it is as simple as adding a tag within the code for you website.
For Example:
13201 Bruce B. Downs Blvd. MDC 56
Marked up with schema would become:
itemprop=”streetAddress”>13201 Bruce B. Downs Blvd. MDC 56
This would tell the search engines that on this page, the address that’s tagged is the address of the business that is being displayed on the site. Using the same logic we add tags for a logo, individual business owners, along with tags for their photo, email, and much more.
The good thing about Schema is that it is easy to implement, and seems to be relatively fast in showing up in the SERP’s. Using WordPress? There are several good plugins to add Schema to your site. You could add general schema that will work across your entire site, or specific items and pages that you want to bring attention to. Don’t have WordPress? Ask your webmaster!
For a quick visual journey into Rich Snippets, here is an awesome Infographic from MOZ.com:
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