Rich snippets provide webmaster with the useful information to the web search result snippet. The purpose of rich snippet is to give user with more information about the content. It is better to decide the most relevant result for a search query that could generate additional traffic to the site.
Rich snippets are designed to summarize the content of a page making it easier for users to understand what the page is about in search results. If you are considering taking advantage of rich snippets, think about whether a user would find the information helpful when choosing between search results.
Snippets are few lines containing text that comes under each search result list, which are quite helpful. Through this the user is able to get a good sense of the page that is more relevant to the query. Suppose a snippet code is required for the music album that list songs with link to play each of the songs, this can be done using rich snippets easily. As far as the rich snippets are concerned, a site can be defined to each of the search which will result in more clicks per page. This will help Google find out the relevant information by adding the additional HTML markup to each of your pages. This markup will further help Google recognize certain types of data and display the required information in the snippets. Various steps need to be followed to make the snippets. Giving a look into this is very important.
Search Engine Results Page (SERP) for a product-based search displays a result with both the normal “search snippet” (a meta description) and the “rich snippet” (which features product reviews, stat ratings, the price and how many products are in stock).
Google searches for specific contents of reviews, people, recipes, events, music, business and organization when they look at the snippets. The Google also recognizes the video content and uses that to improve the search contents. Testing markups is needed to ensure Google reads and extracts the marked up data. This can be done using the snippets testing tools.
Below is a screen shot from Google search results for keyword search “amazon”. In this a star rating and total reviews received for that Application is seen. This information is not present in Google search results by default. Rich snippets need to be used to enable this option.
To check whether the rich snippet is successfully configured after its implementation, Google testing tool for rich snippets can be used. This is important, as your web page may not get indexed immediately. But using this tool it is possible to know if indexing is done correctly.
This article was written by Varsha Kori, SEO Manager.
