Ever heard of “Semantic Markup”, the “Semantec Web” or “Semantic SEO”? What about, “Microformats” or even “GoodRelations”? Well if you have, you’ll know these have changed how we write up our HTML code forever. Well, I recommend you pay more attention to it because it most certainly has. Read this blog post to understand the benefits and how to implement this on your site so you too can increase your organic CTR & conversion rate.
What are Google Rich Snippets?
Google Rich Snippets are additional bits of data that Google uses to enhance the appearance of your organic listings in Google. You’ll know what I’m talking about if you’ve recently searched for a restaurant review or recipe in Google and you noticed a stars rating or reviewing the restaurant or recipe. Letting Google know you have this additional data you’d like to promote is the first step. So, to start, you first have to provide this data by using microformats or RDFa to mark up your web page content where you must follow a specific format: Microdata, Microformats, RDFa and GoodRelations.
How Did Google Rich Snippets Increase my Organic Traffic?
What if I told you that Google Rich Snippets increased my organic traffic by 40%?
What if I told you that my restaurant review pages rank higher than Yelp.ca? Would you need proof? Here it is baby!
Read my post about Google Rich Snippets and Microformats to learn more
How Do I Add Google Rich Snippets to Content?
Learning Resources:
Can Google Rich Snippets Increase my Organic CTR & Conversion Rate?
If you’ve attended any Search Engine Strategies conference and sat in on a Landing Page Optimization session, you’ll know one of the best ways to increase a buyer’s confidence is by using badges wherever possible. They can be in the form of a starburst, but one of the best ways is by adding star rating icons. Although Google is subjective to whom it lists with stars in its index, having them there definitely represents your organic listing much better and with this new authority your links ever had!
Use Google’s Rich Snippet Testing Tool
How Do I Get my Google Rich Snippets to Show Up?
Here’s a snippet from Knol.Google.com FAQ about Google Rich Snippets:
First, make sure you are marking up your pages in a way that Google understands. Use the Rich Snippets Testing Tool to see if Google’s parsers can extract the data that you have marked up. Once you have marked up content on the relevant pages across your site and confirmed that the marked up content can be extracted successfully by Google, sign up on the “Interested in Rich Snippets” form. Rich snippets from new sites will be enabled automatically from this list over time.
Google does not guarantee that Rich Snippets will show up for search results from a particular site even if structured data is marked up and can be extracted successfully according to the testing tool. Here are some reasons that marked-up pages might not be shown with Rich Snippets:
The marked-up structured data is not representative of the main content of the page.
Marked-up data is incorrect or misleading.
Marked up content is hidden from the user (see the section above: “Hidden div’s — don’t do it!”)
The site has very few pages (or very few pages with marked-up structured data) and may not be picked up by Google’s Rich Snippets system.
References:
- http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/richsnippets
- http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/topic.py?hl=en&topic=21997
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