Rich Snippets to Help You Rank Better
One way to help your website get better rankings is to use what are called “rich snippets”. Now, these 
are also referred to as “microdata”, “microformats” and even RDFa but for all intents and purposes, they’re all pretty much interchangeable. The only difference is that the term “rich snippets” is the name that the search engines use while the other terms are the actual code that’s used to create the snippets in the first place.
First off, what are “rich snippets”? Actually, it’s better to show you rather than just tell you.
Here, I’ve done a search for “peanut butter cookie recipes”. The arrows in the image below show you how the search engines display these rich snippets. In the first example, we have reviews of the recipe as well as links off to other recipes on the same site. The last example shows us the sitelinks of the page.
It’s been observed that sites that make use of these snippets are out-ranking their competitors. The bottom line is, if your site / business has reviews, prices, products, etc., then it would be extremely advantageous for you to use these rich snippets on your own site. Not only does it appear to have an advantage where ranking is concerned but as you can tell with the image above, it makes these listings stand out from the rest.
While getting into all of the separate details on how to mark up your site so that it displays these rich snippets would be extremely time-consuming, Google, Yahoo!, and Bing have all partnered up to give you a site that literally contains everything you need to know about them. The site is at http://schema.org/ and they give you specific examples along with a variety of ideas that you can use including:
- Book
- Movie
- Event
- Organization
- Person
- Local Business
- Product
- Offer
- and so, so much more.
Finally, Google gives you a rich-snippet testing tool at http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/richsnippets to help make sure that you’re on the right track.
Now, all this being said, it is important to note that just because your site is using these snippets, doesn’t mean that they’ll automatically display in the search results. There are a few tests that your site needs to go through in order to qualify – two important ones are
- You can’t have any errors on your site.
- You can’t hide any snippets to help you rank better.
To be honest, the use of rich snippets can be an entire book in and of itself but just know that if you implement these on your own site, and it gets the approval nod from Google, you definitely have an advantage in the search engines – while it’s no guarantee that you’ll rank better, if you can draw more eyeballs to your listing, the better off you’ll be all the way around.