A rich snippet is a piece of HTML code that describes a part of the content of a web page: author, contact, ratings or opinions, downloads, products, events, videos, news, etc. It not only gives meaning and organization to our page, but it is also considered by search engines like Google to index the site.
An example in HTML code of a rich snippet would be the following, which extracts the author’s photo from his Google+ account and displays it as a link on our page:
<a href="google+ url" rel="author">Author's name</a>.There is great flexibility when it comes to inserting rich snippets, as we can choose exactly what to display, where on the page and in what way.
why are rich snippets important?
The presence of rich snippets within a website helps the Google search engine to understand the published content. In other words, the page acquires meaning on the Internet. Google knows that it is about digital marketing or shoe sales, to give examples. So when someone does a search related to our content, they can discover us in the search results.
So, you might think, what’s the point of keywords in the text, if that’s what rich snippets are for? The answer is simple: both are factors that influence the rating that the Google search engine gives to our site.
Now, we already know what these pieces of code are and what they are for. So the next question is: how to put rich snippets on our website?
how to put rich snippets on our website?
Since rich snippets are simple HTML code, we could insert them manually. There are many ways to do it, but the most known are:
- Microdata: the rich format information is contained as attributes in HTML tags.
- JSON-LD: data is encapsulated in JSON, a lightweight data interchange format widely used today.
- RDFa: custom attributes are inserted using RDFa, a group of XHTML extensions that allow extending the semantics of HTML.
However, the above requires some basic knowledge of HTML and JavaScript, so it might be convenient to insert them using a rich snippets extension in WordPress or any other CMS we are using.
how to use rich snippets in WordPress?
To learn how to use rich snippets in WordPress we can download several extensions of this popular CMS and related tutorials. Among them, some of the most valued by users are:
- Rich Snippets WordPress Plugin
- All In One Schema.org Rich Snippets
- Rich Reviews
- Schema App Structured Data
- WP Rich Snippets
These have a wide variety of options that allow you to configure and customize your rich snippets without needing to know programming or web design. In fact, some like WP Rich Snippets are very advanced without increasing the difficulty. To find out how to put rich snippets in the extension of your choice, it will almost always be enough to try the different options offered, or read a tutorial.
