Google Introduces Rich Snippets
By Anna Johnson on May 19th, 2009Google has introduced ‘rich snippets’ to help webmasters convey relevant information about their websites to search engine users.
The aim of rich snippets is to provide Google users with summary information about their search results.
Right now, Google supports data about reviews and people. When someone searches on a product, for example, the search results will allow for short reviews and star ratings to display within a given search result. Alternatively, when searching for a person, Google will display results that help distinguish between people with the same name.
So how, as an Internet marketer, can you capitalize on Google’s roll-out of rich snippets?
Well, to display rich snippets, Google’s engine will look for webpages that are annotated with structured data in a standard format.
That may sound scary but it’s apparently as simple as adding some tags to your HTML code (or, if you’re not technically inclined, hiring someone to do it for you).
To see how to do this, visit Google Webmaster Central
Finally, as Google points out, when you annotate your webpages you won’t just make your structured data available to Google. You’ll also effectively make it available to any other service or tool supporting the same standard.
