Understanding Rich Snippets

March 21, 2011 · Filed Under google, On Page SEO, SEO Advice · 1 Comment

Not too long ago, Google announced a way to search for recipes online (which is very cool by the way). You can search for an ingredient, a recipe, how long something will take to prepare, and even how many calories a recipe has. (See the video below). But even though I fell in love with this idea, what caught my eye was the fact that Google is using rich snippets for this information; something that you may not have heard of before but certainly something that can come in handy for your own business.

First off, rich snippets are a way to showcase certain things about your business. If you run a website that shows recipes you can use rich snippets to display that recipe. Additionally, you can also use these snippets to show reviews of your business, products your business has, and even events that you may be holding.

Now sometimes this can be a little confusing because there are multiple ways to refer to this kind of content that you add to your site. The actual content itself is called a “rich snippet” but the code that’s used to format this content is referred to as “microdata“, “microformats” or even “RDFa” (and if you have a recipe you want to showcase, then you would use the hRecipe microformat).

The best way to understand these snippets is to simply show you. Here’s a screen shot of an organic search result after doing a search for restaurants in Chicago. Note the reviews shown in the organic listings.

These rich snippets also include breadcrumbs, prices, and more. And remember, these rich snippets are data that show up within the organic listings. This is important because typical organic search results are often very similar. There’s a blue link that will take you to the page of the site that’s listed, a brief description of the page, and the web page’s URL. That’s about it. But with rich snippets, you can take this so much further and make your listing stand out from the rest of the listings.

It’s important to note that just because you’re using these snippets on your web pages does not mean that you will rank higher in the search results nor does it mean that Google will automatically start showing these snippets but they do say that they’ll check your site for these snippets when they come to pay a visit.

Now although the name might sound a little intimidating, all it really takes is some basic knowledge of HTML in order to implement these snippets onto your own site. And you can choose whichever format you prefer, the microdata, microformat or RDFa.

Once you’ve picked one of these for your own site, you can also use Google’s Rich Snippets testing tool to see how your site may appear in the search results with this data. Google also offers a way to tell them that you have this data available on your site.

Although it might sound a little confusing right now, visiting any one of the above sites will show you examples of rich snippet data. The bottom line is, if you have any of the following located on your site: