Of all the talk here about web site customization and organic search engine rankings, one point we haven’t mentioned is customizing how your site appears in Google’s search engine results page.
That’s right, you can now easily customize how your listing appears in Google…before you were limited to just titles and descriptions but now you can include star ratings, product images, prices, business addresses and more.
Look at this example…you can see a star rating system, number of reviews and a price range.
Google’s Rich Snippets feature displays this information, pulling it from special tags imbedded in the page’s HTML code. Those special tags come in two forms: microformats or RDFa.
While they sound complicated, each of these formats are pretty easy to master. Developers have yet to settle on a standard but Google accepts both. To denote data to be displayed on your Google listing, you simply wrap it with descriptive class attributes in one of these two tags.
Here’s what the code would look like for Café Cakes:
<div class=”hreview”>
<span class=”name”>Café Cakes</span>
<span class=”rating”>4</span>out of 5.
<span class=”count”>28</span>reviews.
<span class=”pricerange”>$</span>
</div>
The “hreview” tag tells Google that it’s a review…the other information is added using the name, rating, count and pricerange span classes.
For now, Google only has Rich Snippet Listings for marketing restaurants online. They are working to add more categories but currently, business directory sites and others based on user reviews and categorizing businesses stand to gain the most. But Google is rapidly expanding this program so Rich Snippets is likely to become more relevant to many other types of websites in the future as well.
Search Engine News says “…listings that are enhanced with Rich Snippets can expect to increase their click through rate – so we highly recommend them.”
Google has some great examples and tutorials on the following Rich Snippets: Reviews, People, Products and Businesses and organizations. And learn much more about Google’s Rich Snippets in general here.