Rich Snippets are generally used to show additional information about your webpage, in the SERPs.This way, people know a bit more about what they are clicking through to, before the choose which search-result to click on.If you search for a film, for example – “into the wild”; the SERPs should show a ‘star-rating’:
This is done with Rich Snippets code.You can add Rich Snippets to help ‘describe’:
– People
– Restaurants
– Music Albums
– Businesses and organisations
– Authors
– In-Depth Articles
– Recipes
– Videos
– Products
– Events
It can also be added to breadcrumbs (navigational text links, usually near the top left of some webpages. They show the homepage, subdomain, page that you’re viewing) and videos.
Creating The Rich Snippets Code
This is really confusing, because there are 3 different types of code you can use to create the rich snippets markup:
– Microdata – Microformats -RDFa
I’ll be honest, I don’t really know the different between them, I think microdata contains a lot of words like “itemscope” and “itemprop”, but that’s the limit to my knowledge.
There is a bit of a hack fortunately.
Just visit http://schema-creator.org/ and choose the type of thing you want to mark up.
Then fill in the form and copy the code from the box on the right hand side, and paste it into the <body> of your HTML.
Once you’ve done that visit
http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/richsnippets
to make sure it’s working okay.
You can also add Rich snippets to breadcrumbs – this isn’t covered in the schema-creator website.
Here’s an example of the code for breadcrumbs, using microdata
– Replace all the blackbeltwhitehat URLs to your own domain, subdomain and webpage
– Replace the page titles – blackbeltwhitehat.com, SEO for Action Fans & Rich Snippets are used in the code below.
Rich Snippets can also be used for software applications and videos but I’ve not attempted this yet, as it looks solid to do.
Small Business Dad 