From a search engine user’s perspective, rich snippets are very important since they help them decide more quickly and more efficiently if a particular page indeed contains the information that they are interested in. They are so designed as to give online users a good sense of what’s there on the page in SERPs and how it’s relevant to the respective query. This is indeed very critical for your prospects to find the site pages right there in top relevant results.

Rich snippets- a form of structured content including business listings, reviews, product details, management profile (key staff personnel, their role and job title), upcoming events etc– are aimed at providing more pertinent information about the particular page in response to a user query.  In other words, they help people recognize sites/ pages relevant to their interest and needs regarding data, resulting in more clicks to informative pages.

They are beneficial in terms of enhancing click-through rates significantly and reduce the amount of bounces. Google has unveiled many in the past for shopping, reviews, video, events, recipes, and music. It is also possible to view application snippets from a number of marketplaces as well as review sites like Android Market, CNET, Apple iTunes etc. It’s equally easy and convenient to add app markup on a site.

Actually incorporated at site level itself, rich snippets let webmasters label key parts of the business, product or service related information. Each labeled part of text represents a specific thing. For example, About Us page of a site can be marked up for each key part such as address, contact details, feedback form etc using rich snippets, whereas snippets for product categories can be based on brands, models and brief descriptions and offer details. Here are a few things to keep in mind while using rich snippets, as elaborated by Google:

• Generally speaking, Google won’t show any content in rich snippets, which is not visible to a normal user. It would be quite tempting to add all of the content pertinent to a rich snippet in one single place on the page, then mark it up, and hide the whole block of text with techniques such as display:none, value-title and css. However, it is advisable not to do so! Google will invariably ignore content invisible to human users, so a wise idea would be to mark up the text visitors will see on your pages.
• Ensure your marked-up content is representative of the main content of the page and not anything else. Google needs certain data to generate a rich snippet preview for each product type. For example, a Review without a reviewer or a Review-aggregate without a count will not generate a preview. Some items can incorporate other sub-items. In a case like this, you can convey the relationship between these types of data by nesting Person information (reviewer details) and Organization information (address details) inside that review.

Microdata properties can also be used to mark up the name and address (and other elements like street name zip code) details, which can be important for brand managers planning to host a business event or for specifying the location of a branch/ store in Local Search. Correctly used event properties can boost clickthrough rates and ensure success of an event.