In recent years, search engines have become more user-friendly by including smarter, context-sensitive results, such as local search and Google's new Knowledge Graph. While these changes are great for searchers, they often make it hard for even top-ranked search results to grab a user's attention. Rich Snippets are one way to make your website's search results more eye-catching and boost your click-through rates and conversions. "Rich Snippets” refer to extra information which enhances a search result, telling you more about the website’s content before clicking on it. The most common form of snippet is the 5-star rating, but there are many others that can augment results for blog posts, products, apps and more. In this presentation, Wayne Eaker of Zengenuity will describe what Rich Snippets are, explain what types of search results can be improved with them, and give a non-technical overview of how you configure your website to support them. He will show some real world examples, and demonstrate tools for creating and testing your own Rich Snippets code.

1. Increasing Search Result
Clickthroughs with Rich Snippets
Wayne Eaker, Zengenuity @wayneeaker
November 28, 2012 @ LA2M

2. CLICK THROUGH RATE BY SEARCH RESULT POSITION
1: 36.4%
2: 12.5%
3: 9.5%
4: 7.9%
5: 6.1%
6: 4.1%
Source: http://www.seomoz.org/ugc/how-to-get-more-clicks-with-low-rankings
TRADITIONAL SEO/SERP

3. RICH SNIPPETS

4. RICH SNIPPETS

5. RICH SNIPPETS

6. WHY DOES GOOGLE USE RICH SNIPPETS?
1. Provide quick answers to simple questions without leaving search
page.
2. Improves searcher’s ability to find the “right” page.
3. Searcher’s have better idea what to expect on the destination page
before they click.
RICH SNIPPETS

7. HOW DOES GOOGLE GENERATE RICH SNIPPETS?
RICH SNIPPETS

8. HOW DOES GOOGLE GENERATE RICH SNIPPETS?
Depends on who you are:
RICH SNIPPETS

9. HOW DOES GOOGLE GENERATE RICH SNIPPETS?
Depends on who you are:
For “Big Sites” (Yelp, YouTube, Wikipedia, Amazon):
Google writes custom code to extract relevant information
RICH SNIPPETS

10. HOW DOES GOOGLE GENERATE RICH SNIPPETS?
Depends on who you are:
For “Big Sites” (Yelp, YouTube, Wikipedia, Amazon):
Google writes custom code to extract relevant information
For Everyone Else:
Google looks for special machine-readable codes your HTML
...Maybe
RICH SNIPPETS

11. WHAT ABOUT OTHER SEARCH ENGINES?
Other search engines are not currently displaying rich snippets from
website-coded microdata.
However, Microsoft is a partner in the format specification, so it’s
possible it may be implemented in Bing at some point.
RICH SNIPPETS

12. WHAT TYPE OF MARKUP DOES GOOGLE UNDERSTAND?
1. Microdata: http://dev.w3.org/html5/md/
• WC3 Proposal
• “HTML5”
2. RDFa: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RDFa
• More complex, more complete
• Extensible
3. Microformats: http://microformats.org/
• Collection of domain-specific formats
• hCard, hCalendar, hRecipe, hReview
DATA FORMATS

13. <div>
<div>L’Amourita Pizza</div>
<div>Reviewed by Ulysses Grant on Jan 6.</div>
<div>Delicious, tasty pizza on Eastlake!</div>
<div>L'Amourita serves up traditional wood-fired
Neapolitan-style pizza, brought to your table promptly
and without fuss. An ideal neighborhood pizza joint.</
div>
<div>Rating: 4.5</div>
</div>
EVENT EXAMPLE - WITHOUT MICRODATA

14. <div>
<div itemscope itemtype="http://data-vocabulary.org/Review">
<span itemprop="itemreviewed">L’Amourita Pizza</span>
Reviewed by <span itemprop="reviewer">Ulysses Grant</span> on
<time itemprop="dtreviewed" datetime="2009-01-06">Jan 6</
time>.
<span itemprop="summary">Delicious, tasty pizza in Eastlake!
</span>
<span itemprop="description">L'Amourita serves up traditional
wood-fired Neapolitan-style pizza, brought to your table promptly
and without fuss. An ideal neighborhood pizza joint.</span>
Rating: <span itemprop="rating">4.5</span>
</div>
</div>
EVENT EXAMPLE - WITH MICRODATA

15. LOCATION - GOOGLE PLACES: http://www.google.com/places/

16. VERIFIED AUTHOR LINK

17. VERIFIED AUTHOR LINK

18. HOW DO YOU SETUP VERIFIED AUTHOR LINK?
Basically:
1. Set up a Google Plus account.
2. Link your blog to the Google Plus profile, with rel=“author” links.
3. Link your Google Plus profile to the blog.
Specifically:
1. Follow directions here:
https://plus.google.com/authorship
VERIFIED AUTHOR LINK

19. BREADCRUMBS

20. HOW DO YOU SETUP BREADCRUMBS?
Make sure your website urls have consistent hierarchical patterns. For
example:
http://zengenuity.com
http://zengenuity.com/blog
http://zengenuity.com/blog/201211
http://zengenuity.com/blog/201211/week-drupal-november-2-2012
BREADCRUMBS

21. REVIEWS / RATINGS

22. EVENTS

23. EVENTS - AGGREGATE

24. EVENTS - AGGREGATE

25. PERSON

26. PERSON

27. PRODUCT

28. APP OR SOFTWARE

29. APP OR SOFTWARE

30. MUSIC

31. RECIPES

32. DO RICH SNIPPETS WORK?
Hard to find scientific studies of effectiveness
Anecdotally:
Verified Author Links:
30% Increase in CTR: http://selnd.com/U153cP
484% Increase in CTR: http://bit.ly/WtDDyh
Recipes:
150% Increase in CTR: http://bit.ly/Tj9Nvx
RICH SNIPPETS - EFFECTIVENESS

33. DESKTOP / LAPTOP RICH SNIPPETS

34. DESKTOP / LAPTOP RICH SNIPPETS

35. MOBILE RICH SNIPPETS

36. HOW DO YOU GET RICH SNIPPETS FOR YOUR SITE?
In simple terms:
1. Put the correct code on your website.
2. Verify the code using Google’s Rich Snippet Testing Tool.
3. Make sure Google is indexing your site pages using Google
Webmaster Tools.
4. Wait.
5. Wait some more. (2 - 8 weeks)
6. Check manually in search engine, or with Google Webmaster Tools
or Google Analytics.
7. PROFIT!
RICH SNIPPETS - HOW TO ENABLE

37. GOOGLE WEBMASTER TOOLS - STRUCTURED DATA

38. GOOGLE WEBMASTER TOOLS - STRUCTURED DATA

39. GOOGLE WEBMASTER TOOLS - AUTHOR STATS

40. RICH SNIPPET TESTING TOOL http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/richsnippets

41. RICH SNIPPET TESTING TOOL http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/richsnippets

42. HOW DO YOU LEARN THE SYNTAX?
Best Place: Google’s page on Rich Snippets:
http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=99170
Has examples for every snippet type I showed, in all three markup
formats. Easy to understand.
Other Resources:
Microdata: http://schema.org/
Microformats: http://microformats.org/
TOOLS AND RESOURCES

43. HOW DO YOU GET RICH SNIPPETS FOR YOUR SITE?
Wordpress:
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/tags/rich-snippets
Plugins for Reviews, Recipes, Events, Author (AuthorSure)
Drupal:
Has RDFa support built into Drupal 7
Microdata Module: http://drupal.org/project/microdata
Schema.org Module: http://drupal.org/project/schemaorg
Fivestar Module (for Ratings): http://drupal.org/project/fivestar
TOOLS AND RESOURCES

44. What Now?

45. QUICK WINS
If you have a local business:
Make sure you have a Google Places profile set up.
If you have a blog:
Set up Verified Author Links immediately. (only 12% of tech bloggers
have done this as of August 2012.) *
Google Webmaster Tools:
Register your site with Webmaster Tools so you can track progress.
* Source: http://www.conductor.com/blog/2012/08/how-9-out-of-10-tech-sites-could-improve-their-search-listings-with-one-simple-fix/
RICH SNIPPETS

46. NEXT STEPS
If you have reviews / ratings on your site:
Set up the review format on your site.
If you have events on your site:
Set up the event format on your site.
If you have recipes on your site:
Set up recipe format on your site. Consider adding star-ratings if you
don’t already have them. Make sure you have photos. (and the photos
are properly coded to the recipe format)
RICH SNIPPETS

47. BEYOND THAT
Breadcrumbs:
Make sure your URLs follow a natural hierarchical pattern, and there
aren’t 404s at some levels of the hierarchy.
Depending your site content:
Consider implementing the other formats. Google is less likely to
display them, but it can’t hurt.
RICH SNIPPETS

48. Questions?
Wayne Eaker
http://wayneeaker.com/rich-snippets
wayne@zengenuity.com
@wayneeaker