Monday 28 January 2013

How to Markup content for Google Rich Snippets


There is a lots of discussions in the SEO related to Rich Snippets. It is easy to markup your page content for Rich Snippets. There are three markup formats to markup content for Rich Snippets. The ways are as following:

1) Microdata
2) Microformats
3) RDFa

Microdata:

Major search engines like Google, Yahoo, MSN, Bing etc. use this markup format to improve the search results. Microdata is a suggested markup format for GoogleRich Snippets by Google itself. You should use microdata format to apply rich snippets. It is a quality feature of HTML5 which provides way for embedding markup into HTML documents. Microdata is very helpful for web crawlers to understand the information containing a web page. It can become a rich browsing experience for searchers or users in getting more relevant search results. You can understand microdata as an example. If you want to create a microdata to describe a person, then there are various basic properties to define microdata as:

·         Name: It includes your full name.

·         Photo: It is important to have Google plus account and a human photo to apply for Google Rich Snippets. It is a link to a photo or picture of you. Google will not show a product image. The photo must be of a human.

·         URL: This is link to a site associated with you includes Google Profiles or Webblogs. 

You can markup your content for various things including Marking up People, Organizations, Events, Music, Reviews, Recipes, Software, Breadcrumbs etc.

Microformats:

Microformats are another type of format to markup content for Rich Snippets. This format is simple and used to describe additional information of a web page like an event, review, and about a person etc. Microformats generally assign brief and expressive names to entities and their properties. You can understand by an example containing basic contact information for Ajay Choudhary.

<div>
   <img src="www.example.com/ajay.jpg" />
   <strong>Ajay Choudhary</strong>
   Internet Marketer and SEO Expert.
   120 Main St
   Jaipur, Sanganer 302029
</div>

RDFa:

It is third type of Markup format for Rich Snippets. You can increase the chances of your site in getting more visits by increasing the click through rate(CTR). It is a way to express specific type of information about people, reviews and their products etc. 

In RDFa you can generally use simple attributes in XHTML tags and can assign additional information for which you want either person, people or their products. You can understand by the following example as:

<div>
My name is Ajay Choudhary but people call me Ajju. Here is my home page: 
seointernetservices.blogspot.com.
I live in Jaipur, and work as an freelancer.
</div>
 
Related Topics you might also like: 

How to apply Google Rich Snippets to search results

Wednesday 23 January 2013

How to apply Google Rich Snippets to search results


Google rich snippets are normally designed to provide external information to users or searchers about the page. Users can easily get detailed product information and could understand what the page is about in SERP’s.  Rich Snippets are few lines of text which become visible under search results. You can describe the content of your page in an easy way by taking the advantages of Rich Snippets. It is very useful for SEO service providers. They could offer various benefits to their businesses by using snippets. The benefits you would have by Rich Snippets include:

1)      You can pay attention of users to your relevant search results.

2)      You could provide external information about your product instantly.

3)      SEO services provider can have benefits for their blogs. They can increase click through rates and less the bounce rate of their blogs and websites.

4)      Snippets are also useful in getting search engine rankings for blogs and websites. You can alert search engines about the relevancy of your content.

Google Rich Snippets
Rich Snippets in Search Results

How to apply Google Rich Snippets:

It is easy to apply Google Rich Snippets to your blog and website. There are three steps you can use to apply rich snippets.  

1) Choose a markup format: 

There are three formats which are acceptable by Google for Rich Snippets. You should have basic knowledge oh HTML for using this format. The formats are as:

·        Microdata
·        Microformats
·        RDFa

Google recommends to use microdata format.

2) Markup your content for Rich Snippets:

Markup the content for users is very important thing to apply rich snippets. You can markup various content types including People, Reviews, Products, Recipes, Businesses and Organizations, Events and music etc. Google supports all these types of markup content for rich snippets. You can easily understand how to markup your content by following example as:

·        If your site is about songs and you provide song lyrics, It is important for you to make sure that the reviews are about the quality of lyrics and not about the quality of song itself.

3) Test your markup by tool:

Now it is the time to test your marked up content with correct HTML coding. You can use Google Rich Snippets testing tool for testing your marked up content. You could become sure that Google would properly read your Marked up data and show it in the search results. You can find the source here as: 

Now you have completed and Google will discover your markup when it will next crawl your website or web page and show rich snippets in search engine results. You need to patience because Google can take several days or weeks to crawl and read your markups.