Gaining SEO Through Rich Snippets

Rich snippets are one of the best ways to improve search results. Basically the idea behind rich snippets is to tell the search engine spiders EXACTLY what each part of the website does. So addresses get the itemprop=”address” tag added. This can be done through a span or div element. The span element could look like this:

<span itemprop="address">123 Sycamore Ave.</span>

This tells the search engines what parts of a website are important for certain queries (“What is that business’s address?). Try tagging multiple parts of your website, starting with the content and working around the various areas such as
the header and footer.

For a complete guide to rich snippets, visit the very nicely done Google guide to Microdata & Rich Snippets.

Here are some more examples of how to use rich snippets in your code:

<div itemscope itemtype="http://data-vocabulary.org/Person"> 
  My name is <span itemprop="name">Bob Smith</span> 
  but people call me <span itemprop="nickname">Smithy</span>. 
  Here is my home page:
  <a href="http://www.example.com" itemprop="url">www.example.com</a>
  I live in Albuquerque, NM and work as an <span itemprop="title">engineer</span>
  at <span itemprop="affiliation">ACME Corp</span>.
</div>

Are you using rich snippets? How successful have they been in improving your search results?

Written by: Jophiel Silvestrone

Jophiel Silvestrone has written 330 posts in the Tech Blog.

Jophiel grew up on a ranch in Paradise Valley, Montana near Chico Hot Springs. Working on the ranch instilled work ethic and self motivation. Filled with this drive, Jophiel started mowing the local school's yards twice a month throughout the summers, at the age of 12. He moved to Billings in 2004, where he has been deeply involved in the local business community ever since. A serial entrepreneur, Jophiel has ran multiple businesses in our local community. The first business, a janitorial and carpet cleaning company, founded in 2005, has employed over 50 locals. Moving on to the media industry, Jophiel and several partners founded Green Directory Montana in the spring of 2007. Green Directory's sustainability ranking software awarded points based on sustainable or "green" actions. These points counted towards a business's total "Green Score," which in turn ranked them against other businesses in their category and throughout the entire site. It also featured a limited edition print version distributed annually. A business acquisition allowed Jophiel to focus on new projects, and a few close business colleagues and Jophiel started Rocky Mountain Mr. & Ms. Magazine, a lifestyle publication for men and women in the Magic City. After a year and a half at the helm of RM3 Magazine, the business was purchased. He now runs a web development company SkyPoint Studios and fathers his son Jaoquin, who plays football, basketball, soccer, and is learning snowboarding from his dad. Recently, has expanded to locations in Havasu, Arizona & Vegas. SkyPoint Studios is a market leader in both Billings & Havasu and Jophiel is working on building that same level of market dominance in Vegas. Specialties: Extensive experience in online and offline business. Especially savvy at WordPress, and operate several sites, one example is the blog: skypointwebdesignbillingsmontana.com/tech-blog. Check out skypointwebdesignbillingsmontana.com for the latest projects from SkyPoint Studios.