Rich Snippets

In Chapter 8 we explain how to influence your search result snippet. One of the best ways to do this is by using rich snippets–enhancements to the normal search results pages that are enabled by adding additional tags highlighting an element of information. You have many choices for the kinds of tags you can use, including microdata, microformats and RDFa.  One of the best resources for the different types are from the standards organization schema.org.

As an example, let’s look at the business information element, which most businesses should be using. Here is an example that Google provides to illustrate how the element works. Suppose your company is the restaurant L’Amourita Pizza. You might have  your information stored in a simple HTML clock in the footer of your website:

<div>
   L'Amourita Pizza
   Located at 123 Main St, Albuquerque, NM.
   <img alt="logo" src="http://www.example.com/logo.png" />
   Phone: 206-555-1234
   <a href="http://pizza.example.com">http://pizza.example.com</a>
</div>

You can modify this code by adding the microformat code to it to inform the search engines as to what each element is.

<div itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Organization"> 
   <span itemprop="name">L'Amourita Pizza</span> 
   Located at 
   <div itemprop="address" itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/PostalAddress">
      <span itemprop="streetAddress">123 Main St</span>,
      <span itemprop="addressLocality">Albuquerque</span>,
      <span itemprop="addressRegion">NM</span>.
   </div>
  <img itemprop="logo" src="http://www.example.com/logo.png" />
   Phone: <span itemprop="telephone">206-555-1234</span>
   <a href="http://pizza.example.com/" itemprop="url">http://pizza.example.com</a>
</div>

There are a number of plugins for WordPress and Drupal to make some of the coding easier for you.   If you use a different CMS then you can try the Schema Creator tool from Raven Tools. If you want a quick way to tag some of the elements without coding or while you’re waiting for the pages to be coded, you can use Google’s Data Highlighter which is a function within Google Webmaster Tools. Once you have updated your page, you can test it to see what it looks like as a search result using the Google Structured Data Testing Tool.