Search Engine Optimization – Why Rich Snippets Should Be Part of Your Strategy

It is all about semantics. The meanings of words, or text can be a sticking point in a heated discussion. They can also be important to your search engine optimization, or SEO. While creating new content is one of the cornerstones to improving page rankings, a tool, known as rich snippets could also aid in getting more clicks from truly interested viewers. It helps people conducting searches to know right away if you are relevant to what they’re looking for.

Basic snippets are the bits of information shown in the brief summaries appearing in search result pages. The trouble is, it’s not possible for the search engines to understand the semantics of what appears on your Web page, and therefore cannot optimize, or highlight, pertinent information.

What are they?

Introduced by Google in 2009, rich snippets label bits of information to provide clues to the search engine about the meanings of words on your page. In doing that, rich snippets can then label each piece of data to display the most suitable bits for search.

You may have seen rich snippet displays, particularly for restaurant or product sites. They can include certain phrases, those star ratings, pictures, or other identifying pieces of information. The idea is to provide people with immediate details, thus helping them to weed through results to find what they’re looking for, hopefully resulting in more clicks.

To enable Google to recognize and display rich snippets, you’ll need to add semantic HTML markup to your page. Oddly, rich snippet formats aren’t widely used… about 5% of web pages are using rich snippet markup, according to Google product manager Kavi Gael. Here’s a brief rundown of what you’ll need to do if rich snippet markups are added to your SEO strategy.

Select a format:

Google says there are three formats for doing this, but they back the use of microdata. The other formats include RDFa and microformats.

Mark-up your content:

Currently, rich snippets are supported for the following content

* products

* reviews

* events

* people

* businesses and organizations

* recipes

* music

Google will also recognize markup for video content to improve search results.

Test your mark up:

Use the rich snippets testing tool to be sure your data can be pulled.

Business 2 Community sites a ReadWriteWeb article describing the use of rich snippets as ‘the wave of the future’ believing they will change the way people design websites and conduct search marketing.

Riding the rich- snippet- markup wave could help drive more business to your page. And while the semantics of “rich” can vary… it’s definitely a word that strikes a positive chord for businesses looking to get noticed and to increase sales.

Source:

http://avaxusa.com/search-engine-optimization-%E2%80%93-why-rich-snippets-should-be-part-of-your-strategy/

Avax - About Author:
At Avax we have carved the strategy of seo outsourcing solutions within our search engine marketing consulting, which provides our clients the competitive advantage in gaining significant keyword rankings and sustenance when you get to the top of Google.

Article Source:
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