What Are Rich Snippets?
About 2 years ago we (I mean my speed dating company partners) became aware of Rich Snippets. Still, a year later, I am explaining to people what they are and how to deploy them. I can give you a good example of how we are using them, and a couple really cool resources.
Rich Snippets are simply the reformatting of information within search engine results, like Google. You will notice for instance that occasionally an image, a video, a recipe, review stars or event listings show up reformatted under your search results. An good example of this can be seen when you search on Google for “Speed Dating Seattle”. You will see our Pre-Dating.com Seattle events show up nicely under the Google Results.
In our Speed Dating business we used to think of ourselves as cutting edge (at least on the tech side). On the design side we are way behind, but things like Rich Snippets are showing us that we still have a long way to go to get up to date on current technology. In fact, you will never be up to date. You have to keep on learning and trying new things out. The point of this blog post is that there is a way to format your Google results. In fact, in this WordPress post I am using the Rich Snippet Plugin. What I am trying to accomplish with this Plugin, is getting the “Person” Rich Snippet implemented, as listed under Schema.org.
If you go to Schema.org you will be able to look up the mark up language that is required to set up your Rich Snippets for a particular type of entity or thing you are indexing on the search engines. This is where it goes from being a marketer to a developer. For the events Rich Snippets I did the edits in my PHP code. For a WordPress site like this, I was looking for a better, quicker solution, and that is when I ran into Rich Snippets Plugin, which should take care of my needs. My need is to have my picture show up right next to my blog listing, when I post this entry. Not sure if that is going to work. If it doesn’t I will have a follow-up entry which attempts to do it again.
Rich Snippet Plugin
You can get the Rich Snippet Plugin here.
I am trying out the All In One Schema.org Rich Snippets Plugin, and will find out in the next 24 hours if this technique will work properly. In the end you should be search on a bit of text from this post, like grab “For the events Rich Snippets I did the edits in my PHP code. For a WordPress site” and find the Google Listing. If everything has worked correctly, you should see a different view of this Blog Post, where the image should be my personal image. That is the Rich Snippet I was aiming for or you need some assistance. In my next Blog Post about Rich Snippets I will give my overall assessment of All In One Schema.org Rich Snippets Plugin.
Email me if you have any questions about this at dgudema AT gmail DOT com