When users visit Google, they generally have an idea of exactly what they are looking for unless of course, they are conducting a random search without any specific keywords in mind. However, they still need some help to decide which result might include the information, even random in nature, which will best meet their needs. So Google always looks to devise ways and means of highlighting the content on a given page in a useful and concise manner to users. And this is where rich snippets come into play.

Essentially, they provide webmasters with the ability to help the engine highlight key aspects of their pages. Whether the page consists of product/services details, events or apps, some basic additions to the markup can lead to better engagement with site content, thus more traffic to it and potentially increased conversions. For them to surface on a site, rich snippet markup needs to be implemented on the pages and then to be thoroughly tested with the rich snippets testing tool just to make sure it’s correct. However, it may take a few weeks for Google engine to crawl your site.

Picking up a markup format

If you’ve marked up the content for rich snippets, but they fail to show up in search results, you may check if your markup follows Google usage guidelines. There are specific usage guidelines, and your markup must follow them guidelines, while using rich snippets for events, products, reviews,  recipes etc. For example, while making use of review markup, the core topic of that page should be about one particular product/ service. Using review markup on a page that is comprised of multiple products is usually not supported.

Also check for correctness of your markup and whether the marked-up content is representative of content on that page. Your markup should also include proper nesting. Your markup should match the broad requirements for each of the content types. Crosscheck for any missing tags or attributes, and verify that the information is in the proper format. microformats, microdata, or RDFa can be used to mark up the content, albeit pick one markup standard format across the page.

Google recommends usage of microdata, though any of the above three mentioned formats are acceptable. The HTML5 microdata specification is a basic way of labeling content to denote a specific data type like reviews or events. Each type of information describes a peculiar item. For instance, an event will have the properties venue, category, starting time etc. Microdata employs simple attributes in HTML tags (often <div> or <span>) for assigning brief/ descriptive names to items/ properties.

On the other hand, microformats are entities (simple conventions) used on pages for describing a particular type of information. Each entity will have its own properties. Generally, they make use of the class attribute in HTML tags (often <span> or <div>), whereas RDFa use simple attributes in XHTML tags.

Also, utilize the right property names. For instance, the appropriate RDFa property name to mark the number of reviews is count. In case the number of reviews is marked up using a property labeled reviewCount, no preview would get generated. The rich snippets testing tool as part of Google Webmaster Tools helps in verifying the markup.