Today we would like to talk Advanced SEO Suite Magento module that has very rich set of options to offer in order to help with On Site Magento Search Engine Optimization. One of the important feature of this module is Google Rich Snippets and Opengraph support. Let us discover how effectively to set it up.
What is Rich Snippets?
Rich Snippets were created by Google in order to collect the most important information from the page content and to make a short and detailed summary of it. Therefore, users would be able to easily understand what is this page about before taking a decision to clicking on it in search returns results. Reach snippets are visible everywhere and they appear in search engine results and include very short information such as reviews, rates, price etc.
Actually for an average internet user rich snippets is a short and attractive form of information that gives them ability to evaluate the relevance of their search results on a particular website. So, basically giving a quicker access to the information that reach snippets provide, you have a great opportunity to increases Click-Through-Rates (CTR) by up to 30% and much more.The most important is to make it correctly. Rich snippets give you an additional space to work on optimization and a great chance to highlight the most important content of your site within search engine results.
Let us have look and discover Rich snippets benefits:
- Drive an attention to your website among other search results
- Provide a detailed information for users, so they can evaluate the relevance of search results to their query
- Increase CTR (click-through rates) and decrease bounce rate as searchers immediately evaluate the relevance of the content they were looking for
What you can do with Rich Snippets?
Rich Snippets allow describing entities of several types:
- Organizations
- People
- Products and offers
- Reviews
- Events
- Breadcrumbs
- Videos
- Recipes
There are many different markup options but in our Advanced SEO Suite we have implemented 2 options
data-vocabulary.org and schema.org. Actually Google provides a detailed instruction on how to implement Rich Snippets read more about it here. We also suggest you to investigate some examples of Rich snippets implementation in order to get better understanding of a practical side of the subject schema.org
Schema.org is clear for many search engines, therefore, to use it is a priority. Lets us see what Google itself has been saying about schema.org:
schema.org is the result of joint work of Google, Microsoft and Yahoo!
Webmasters no longer have to choose between competing formats for schema.org. so we decided to focus at only one format.
schema.org can provide you with a lot of tips in order to help you to understand how it all works. Please check FAQ.
So, you would like to test your website if Rich snippets are displayed in search results, you can easily do that using different validators. The easiest way to check structured data is Webmaster Tools. But as an experience has shown, even if the validator displays snippets it does not mean that the snippets will be displayed in Google search results. Most often, the validator displays snippets, but they are not displayed in Search results due to the fact that they are trying to be hide in a different way.
Some typical reasons why Rich snippets are not displayed:
- Marked structured data do not match the main content of the page, or may mislead the user;
- Markup data is incorrect, but testing tool could not identify the error;
- Marked-up content is hidden from the user;
- There are not enough pages (or to small number of pages with marked-up structured data), therefore web site can not be picked up by detection system of extended snippets.
As we said before in our Module we use snippets schema.org and here is an example of Rich snippets implementation in Advanced SEO Suite.
Here is what we can see via Structured Data Testing Tool.
Here are search results that Google returns.
Let us discover our Rich snippets structure.
Constructing Scheme of a snippet:
itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Product"
itemprop="image" // add as at schema.org
itemprop="name" //basic requirement of schema.org, without this tag it will not work
//the beginning of the modulation of reviews and rating http://joxi.ru/PlyYU_3JTJA0Y7keLXs
itemscope="" itemprop="aggregateRating"
itemprop="ratingValue"
itemprop="reviewCount"
//the end of of reviews and rating modulation
//The biggining of price and in stock modulation http://joxi.ru/flyYU_3JTJDjPfQk2EY
itemprop="offers" itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Offer"
itemprop="availability" href="http://schema.org/InStock"
itemprop="priceCurrency"
itemprop="price"
//The end of price and in stock modulation
itemprop="description" //can be used as a description in search engine. But recently Search engines have updated their algorithms.
The structure code of our snippets:
..............................................Product Name
39,95 €..............................................Quick Overview
Short descriptionConclusions.
The main objective behind Rich snippet is to make your job easier by making page indexing easier for the search engines. Microdata, microformats along with Rich Snippets can be related to meta tags, indirectly. Search engines are always on the lookout for ways to implement a better semantic approach when they deliver search results and rich snippet is one of the main methods to do so, this is the reason why these are becoming an important factor.
Rich Snippets for SEO: It is a fact that having structured data markup is no guarantee for high rankings in search engine. It does increase the click through rates (CTR) which is done by rich snippets. Hence, if you the search result for your website is laced with images, videos, customer ratings, etc. you website is more likely to get more get better visibility. Making clever use of rich snippet will help you to get your job done by directing more visitors to your web store.