Rich Snippets and Microdata: A Beginner’s Guide

Chances are you’re already familiar with SEO, and you consider this a very important part of your online marketing and digital presence.

But have you ever heard of rich snippets and microdata?

Whether you’ve got someone handling your SEO or you’re the one taking care of it, it’s essential for you to be familiar with the basics of rich snippets and microdata and to understand how they work. This way, you will know if you’re really optimizing your content for the benefit of your business.

What are Rich Snippets?

You know the results you find on Google after you type in your search phrase or keyword? Each result you find on the SERPs often just include the title, URL, and a short description of the page, article, or blog post. This is what’s known as “snippet”.

For some entries, you’ll see an image included or sometimes the photo of the author. There are also those that incorporate other details. For instance, if you’re searching for a recipe, you might find the calories too, time of preparation, and ranking. Thus, such an entry is called a “rich snippet” because it has more information than the usual.

How Rich Snippets Can Help Your Business

Surely you want to enjoy a higher click-through rate for search results that point to your website or e-store. Well, rich snippets can do this for you.

At a glance, a web user is more likely to pick the rich snippet over the others because it is generally more appealing to the eye and it gives more information too. Therefore, rich snippets will generate more traffic in the long run and can even improve your ranking on search engines.

Let’s say you sell cosmetics. Your product page for a lipstick can appear on SERPs with an actual image, a star rating, price, brand, and description. That will surely stand out compared to others. The overall appearance plus the added info give you a greater chance of getting clicked.

Content Types for Rich Snippets

A rich snippet is also known as a structured data markup. It is used for a variety of content types like reviews, products, recipes, music, events, videos, books, businesses, and people.

Let’s say you have a particular product that’s being searched online. When the product page appears on the SERPs, it could be a rich snippet that incorporates the customer rating, brand, price, and description. It also includes the image of the product.

What if you have an event coming up, such as a product launch or a workshop? The rich snippet would include the official name of the event or activity, date and time, location, ticket details, and description.

What is Microdata?

Microdata is actually one of the forms of markup specifications that are recognized by search engines. It’s a code language specifically designed for these search engines. Hence, it’s an important part of rich snippets too and of SEO in general.

Remember the star rating mentioned above that sometimes accompanies recipes, products, or creative works? That’s an example of microdata.

We can say that microdata provides names or labels to content chunks on a page. It informs the search engine what the elements are on the page.

Why Microdata is Important for Your Business

SEO experts will tell you that microdata is highly vital for optimizing content because it makes the search engine’s job easier.

How? It points out the important page elements so that Google and other major search engines will not have a difficult time crawling over your page or website. With the added details given, the search engine is able to define the best way to index and rank your web page.

For example, every product page you have could display an image as well as the price, description, rating, reviews, and product availability. This enhances your SEO and will certainly increase your ecommerce site traffic.

Every business should certainly utilize microdata too by indicating the business name, logo, address, contact number, and description. Such structure markup data will enable web users to get the basic details on your business even without clicking on the link.

As already implied above, microdata is crucial for rich snippets. If you want to have rich snippets, use the code language of microdata to identify certain elements in the search results. This increases the chance for your content to be clicked and visited.

In particular, these are the major benefits of microdata for your business:

  • page rank increase
  • higher click-through rate
  • better search results
  • improved site traffic

Do you know that only a tiny percentage of online businesses make use of microdata? Thus, you will stand out if you’re one of them. You can take advantage of this to have an edge over competitors.

Google has previously hinted that using microdata is a part of their algorithm. So yes, it’s a major factor for your SEO.

Various Applications for Microdata

Microdata makes use of the Schema language, which can help identify particular content chunks on your page. You can apply the microdata to the image, author, headline, date published, format, rating, and more.

You can actually go over to Schema.org to take note of the tags that apply to your page. With the use of Google’s Structured Data Testing Tool, you can then take a look at the overall appearance or outcome through Google’s eyes.

If it seems too technical for you, we’ve got you covered.  Click here for more information.

Standing Out Above the Crowd

Competition online is tough. It’s a challenge to get noticed and to boost your ranking on search engine results pages.

However, if you understand and apply rich snippets and microdata, you’ll no doubt stand out above the crowd, strengthening your digital presence and expanding your reach in the process.

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