Caeden M MacGregor is a writer and SEO consultant for Prestige Marketing, a company specializing in 
internet marketing in Vancouver. Caeden has written for numerous blogs on a variety of topics ranging from guest blogging to landing page optimization. If you want to write guest post check out guest post guideline here
Quality content is essential to any successful SEO campaign. Working as a writer for a firm doing SEO, our client’s websites thrive on it. However, when you’re trying to simultaneously appeal to human readers and search engines—things can get a little tricky. You have to ensure your content is conversational and fresh in order to draw in human readers, while at the same time it needs to be clear to search engines so they can read it and match it properly to human search queries.
Good thing for rich snippets—or content summaries that accompany the Google search engine results (SERPs) for your blog articles when they appear in the main listings. The idea is that rich snippets can help both the search engines and humans launching a Google search find the exact content their looking for online. Rich snippets work by providing extra clarification for web searchers in the world of post-Google Penguin update.
For example, when you submit a search query for a “chicken curry recipe” in Google, you might get a result accompanied by text that reads the following:
“This chicken curry recipe has an average user rating of 6.0 based on 10 reviews…if you like this recipe, you will also enjoy the following recipes.”
This is a rich snippet and the idea behind it is that search engine surfers will have a better understanding of the relevancy and quality of the clickable links before them—depending on how they relate to their own personal search, of course.
Currently, if you do a general search for just about anything these days, you’ll see many SERPs accompanied by similar rich snippet text to help give users a sense of the content quality as well as if it’s relevant to their search query. Essentially, the snippets are meant to add “rich” details to the search engine result in order to make it clearer so people can decide to click or not, depending on what they’re looking for.
It just goes to show how far the search engines have evolved. Keyword matching isn’t enough any longer—exact meaning is now the name of the game and those searching have come to expect that when they use Google to search for everything from personal trainers to real estate agents.
For companies with business blogs, rich snippets offer a whole bunch of opportunities when it comes to SEO, including:
- Providing exact information as it relates to their individual search query
- If your result is particularly relevant users will be more certain to click through
- So rich snippets not only increase click-through rates for relevant users—they decrease bounce rates for non-relevant searchers
And, if you happen to be using your business blog to showcase expert articles with authors attached to each article, you can see how adding a bit of explanatory text under the search result—such as the author’s picture, name, a Google+ user rating, and a link to “more by this author”—to each article would be beneficial for your click through rate.
What’s the usefulness of that added info? Well, there would be definite worth if users are familiar with the author’s name and expertise as many are becoming. The idea of their name, photo, and a link other articles they’ve written will often lead readers to click because they’re already familiar with the author’s other works, they’ve established these authors as experts in their niche, and they know they will get quality content if they click.
How to add rich snippets to your blog
Now that you understand how rich snippets can help you search for relevance faster you see them in the SERPs—and now that you have an idea of what rich snippets can actually do to boost your relevant blog traffic—you’re next step will be to get on board if you feature these types of authored articles on your site. First, you’ll need to create Google+ account in order to add rich author snippets. And secondly, you’ll need to do your own research to see how to add them to your own blog content management system—be it WordPress, Blogger, or another platform. Whatever it is, now you have the gusto and the know-how from reading this article to go forth and recognize the valuable information thanks to rich snippets in your search query. Look for them as you research for the most quality content.
Quality content is essential to any successful SEO campaign. Working as a writer for a firm doing SEO, our client’s websites thrive on it. However, when you’re trying to simultaneously appeal to human readers and search engines—things can get a little tricky. You have to ensure your content is conversational and fresh in order to draw in human readers, while at the same time it needs to be clear to search engines so they can read it and match it properly to human search queries.