By Robin Macrae
You’ve seen in Google search results those product prices, sports event dates and teams playing, star ratings, recipe cooking times and other nuggets of useful information displayed for some pages. They are rich snippets and a valuable SEO enhancement you can add to the content of your site and its pages.
Rich snippet is the term used to describe the structured data markup that can be added to a page’s existing HTML, which in turn allow search engines to better understand what information is contained on the page. S: A Beginner’s Guide to Rich Snippets – Unamo Blog.
There’s no mystery why and how these pages have this advantage. By adding structured data— aka schema markup—to your content, you can make your content stand out and, in the process, enable search engines to provide it to searchers by identifying what it’s about and how it will be relevant to them.
There are all kinds of rich snippets in Google. Here are a few of the more broadly useful schema types from which rich snippets are generated:
- organization details such as addresses and phone numbers
- product information such as model, price and availability
- event dates, times, and locations
- star ratings
Two examples will illustrate how rich snippets and structured data work. After each, I’ve included a bit of the markup used to create the rich snippet just to show that it’s pretty much like filling out a form except, as we’ll see, all you need do is provide the information. A plugin or service does the work of structuring the data and inserting it into a page or post.
Here’s a search, Blue Jays tickets, and the page, Toronto Blue Jays Individual Game Tickets for the second hit:
Here’s another, Samsung LED 50 smart TV, and the page, Samsung 50″ 1080p LED Smart Hub Smart TV (UN50J5200AFXZC) for the first hit:
There are a number of WordPress rich snippets plugins from which to choose and several services that help create, test, evaluate and/or measure schema markup. Most are specialized for structured data but others, the Yoast SEO plugin for example, include it in their repertoire. It’s the WordPress no-code approach applied to this kind of SEO.
In my presentation, SEO with Structured Data | WordCamp Toronto 2017, Scheme your way to more SEO traffic with structured data, I will provide examples of the major schema types and show you how to enable rich snippets in search results for your site, organization, products, events and other important information. We’ll review the best plugins for the job and I’ll give you recommendations on what to consider when choosing one.
P.S. If you haven’t got your ticket, get one now—before they’re gone!
Robin is a WordCamp Toronto 2017 speaker, organiser and author.
@Robin_Macrae.
Be sure you have your ticket to WordCamp Toronto #WCTO. Join in the fun and discovery of growing your business with WordPress.
