What Are Rich Snippets?
A rich snippet is used for summarizing the content offered on a page in an efficient way so users can quickly scan them. They act as a brief description of the search results. To take advantage of rich snippets, first, think about which information users will find useful to make them click on your result over the competition. A rich snippet offers customized SERP results.
Why Use Rich Snippets?
There are multiple reasons to use rich snippets, but the biggest advantage is to increase your click-through rates (CTR) when users find the description interesting enough to continue reading. Below is an example of rich snippets in use to describe what users will find when clicking the result because they are more visually appealing.
How To Add Rich Snippets
Search engines have been using snippets in many forms for a while, including microformats, microdata, and RDFs, and others that Google supports. Although not a new concept, recently, search engines such as Google, Bing, and Yahoo got behind Shema.org as a way to collaborate and improve the use of rich snippets.
With schema.org, you can define item types for content on your website. The following is an example provided in their “Getting Started” section:
In this example, the <div> tag contains information about the movie Avatar, a single item. The first line is a snippet telling search engines it’s a movie. You can get a full list of snippet types at Schema.org.
How To Add Schema Rich Snippets in WordPress
There are many solutions to adding schema and rich snippets to a WordPress website. However, Schema Creator by RavenTools is an efficient and trustworthy plugin.
The plugin will allow you to easily choose the snippet type based on the content you’re adding, such as movie information in the previous example, an event, recipe, organization, person, or various other categories.
Check out the WordPress Plugin database for a great start for plugin resources.
Test Rich Snippet Markup
After adding the snippet markup or plugin, the next step is testing that everything is working properly. There are various tools available for this as well to help troubleshoot issues. For example, with the Google Rich Snippet preview tool, you can paste the URL to preview how the SERP appears in search results.
Google will provide troubleshooting tips if the display is not correct, making it easier to identify and fix the issues.
Need Help?
If you’re not sure how to implement or troubleshoot rich snippets and want help, let us know. Our team of experts can help guide you or assist with installing or testing your rich snippets to ensure success.
