Rich Snippets: Say Whaaa?

I started as an intern here six months ago knowing only the basic principles of SEO. This is why when Greg, our Director of SEO, first mentioned the word rich snippets to me, all I could think was “Uh, say whaaa?”  It sounded cool, but what the heck it actually meant, I had absolutely no idea. Rich snippets are the extra pieces of information that appear under a particular search result.  They’re the reviews, pictures of the author, star ratings or products that make the result stand out amongst the others.  Rich snippets aren’t the ‘if you don’t have this, then you suck at life’ kind of things, but they are eye-catching and seem more trustworthy, and that means your page will get clicked on more.  I’ll put this in perspective with a food example because I like food.  Which burger looks more awesome and satisfying? If you chose the plain hamburger (CLEARLY the burger with onion rings is more wonderful), then that’s probably why we aren’t friends.  Anyway, all of the extra goodness on the better looking burger sums up rich snippets. While a rich snippet by itself won’t increase your page rank, it makes your content in a search result more clickable, resulting in higher click-through rates.  It’s through this higher CTR that your content becomes more shareable (because more people are actually seeing it), which will help improve your rankings.  Here are some real examples and types of rich snippets along with what people would probably say when they see them. Check out the following examples: Recipe Snippets How to add recipe snippets

Review Ratings Snippets (Individual and Aggregate Reviews) How to add review ratings snippets Video Snippets How to add video snippets Organization Snippets How to add organization snippets Music Snippets How to add music snippets People Snippets How to add people snippets Event Snippets How to add event snippets Product Snippets How to add product snippets

I’m not getting into implementation details, so follow the links under each type of snippet to learn how. I’m hungry now, so I’m probably going to go eat a cheeseburger with onion rings on it.