Rich Snippets: How to properly list Reviews, People, Businesses, Events and Recipes for Google

Rich snippets let you share your reviews, people, businesses, events and recipes more accurately with Google.  Why do what helps Google?  Because Google will, in turn, help you.

If you properly implement rich snippets in either microdata, microformats or RDFa — you will see more traffic thanks to enhanced listings in Google.  Google provides useful snippets in search results that are more likely to draw the eye and attention of end users.

Check out the image below and you will see why your site will get more traffic:

See how events are listed from a website in a nice little table?  That’s the work of rich snippets.

Google has published an article on how to integrate rich snippets into your site.  They are useful if your site lists:

• Reviews
• People
• Businesses
• Events
• Recipes

I’m sure sooner or later, there will be many more types of rich snippets.

How do I use Rich Snippets?

It’s actually very easy to upgrade an existing “listing” site to support these rich snippets.  The best way is to read about your specific type of data (click the links in the list above) and also check out Google’s webmaster central article on rich snippets.

Basically there are 3 ways to achieve rich snippet integration.  You can choose any one of the 3:

• Microdata - This will be popular as HTML5 rolls out
• Microformats – This seems to be the most straightforward to me, basic SPAN, DIV, and attribute definitions
• RDFa – This is also fairly easy, but seems more targeted at XHTML than normal HTML to me

Microdata takes advantage of new HTML5 metadata, such as itemscope, itemtype, and itemprop.  This is simple, and probably the future.

Microformats are similar to microdata, but just reworded in standard HTML 4 language (using classes).

RDFa is much more “XMLesque” in terms of using a namespace and implementing tags that correspond to that definition.

I’ve implemented Rich Snippets, now what?

Wait.  It will take Google some time to see your rich snippets (hopefully you did it right) — and once it does see it, it will take longer for search results to reflect your changes.

You should test your work using the Rich Snippets Testing Tool.  Testing my sites seem to work just fine on there.

If you are impatient, or just thorough, you can let Google know you have just implemented rich snippets.

Tags: Businesses, Events, Google, HTML5, microdata, microformats, People, RDFa, Recipes, Reviews, Rich Snippet, Rich Snippets Testing Tool, snippets, Traffic, xhtml

4 Comments to Rich Snippets: How to properly list Reviews, People, Businesses, Events and Recipes for Google

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