Smart Traffic SEO Tip #25 – Overview on Rich Snippets
Rich snippets are additional facts and data from a site that are being shown in search results. This data include reviews, ratings, price range and just this month, Google launched rich snippets for recipes, wherein searchers can see the total cook time for a specific menu. Please see image below. The ones inside the red box are what we call rich snippets.
To display Rich snippets, Google looks for Markup formats that can easily be added to your own web pages. You can actually mark up your structured HTML content in any of these three formats: microdata, microformats, or RDFa.
Note that marking up your content is not enough. You still have to let Google know about it by filling out the required details in this URL: http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/request.py?contact_type=rich_snippets_feedback. The information given might help Google in the detection of marked-up content.
Also, note that marking up your data for rich snippets has nothing to do with your rankings in search results and Google doesn’t guarantee that markup on any given page or site will be used in search results. However, having snippets like these would definitely encourage users to click through your site, thus, help in the increase of your traffic data.
