What Are Rich Snippets & How To Add Them In WordPress
With more than 87 million blog posts being published every month, boosting SEO and ranking for keywords is getting tougher than ever. But, what if there’s a way you can tell Google that your articles are special and make your links stand out in search results?
Yes, it’s possible. In this guide, we’ll show you how it’s done.
If you’ve been struggling to rank higher for keywords even though you produce quality content, adding rich snippets to your posts and pages could help you drastically improve your Google rankings.
Rich snippets is one of the most effective ways of improving website SEO. In this tutorial, we’ll tell you about the benefits of using rich snippets and how to use them in WordPress, step-by-step.
What Is A Rich Snippet?
Have you ever noticed how some links that appear on Google Search results have additional information like a star rating, votes, price, and author names?
These additional pieces of information are called rich snippets. Rich snippets were introduced by the Schema.org project, a collaboration project founded by Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, and Yandex.
Simply put, rich snippets provide users with a short summary of the post before they click on a link. It greatly helps improve click-through rates (CTR).
But, more importantly, rich snippets help search engines like Google learn more about what a post or a page is all about by providing specific information about the link. This allows Google to effective rank these posts for the proper keywords and search terms.
You can use rich snippets in many different types of pages and posts on your website, including, review posts, product pages, recipes, people profiles, videos, movies, and more.
Why Use Them?
In addition to the SEO benefits, rich snippets allow you to quickly attract the attention of your audience as well.
Click through rate (CTR) plays a key role in Google Search ranking. By providing users with a better overview of a post or a review along with an attractive star rating system, you can instantly grab their attention and encourage them to visit your website.
For example, rich snippets are heavily used in cooking recipe sites. The rich snippets for cooking recipes often show useful information, such as the cooking time for a recipe and nutritional value.
Rich snippets also work on Facebook feed to help show the right information when people share your website links on the social network.
As an added bonus, rich snippets will make your website stand out from other mediocre sites and improve site and brand authority as well.
5 Best WordPress Rich Snippets Plugins
Depending on the type of blog you have and the kind of information you’d like to include in your rich snippets, there are few great free and premium plugins you can use to get the job done.
1. All In One Schema Rich Snippets
- Price: Free
This is one of the oldest and most popular WordPress plugins for adding rich snippets. The plugin is being used by over 80,000 websites and it comes with lots of features for adding different types of rich snippets to your posts.
2. Rich Snippets WordPress Plugin
- Price: 67
This premium plugin is more of an advanced rich snippets plugin for professional blogs. It allows you to include more details data about your links, like the time it takes to read a post, type of post, and much more. This plugin is more suitable for advanced users.
3. Rich Reviews
- Price: Free
Rich Reviews is another great free plugin you can use to add simple and basic rich snippets in your blog posts. Since the plugin is free, it includes limited options for adding rich snippet data, but it’s more than enough for a basic blog or if you’re covering reviews.
4. WP Review
- Price: Free / $87
WP Review is a rich snippets plugin made for reviews, recipes, products, and services. The free version of the plugin is limited to few data slots and it’s more suitable for smaller blogs. The premium version costs $87 and includes lots of additional options for adding more data about your posts.
5. WP Rich Snippets
- Price: $69
WP Rich Snippets is another powerful plugin you can use to take your reviews and product pages to the next level. The plugin is ideal for online stores that include lots of product pages and it will work well with magazine blogs as well.
Getting Started
For this demonstration, we’re going to use the popular free plugin All In One Schema Rich Snippets. This plugin is free to use and it’s fairly easy to install. Here’s how it works.
Step 1: Install Schema Rich Snippets Plugin
To install the Schema Rich Snippets plugin, first, login to your WordPress admin dashboard.
Then navigate to Plugins >> Add New and search for the Schema Rich Snippets plugin.
Click the Install button and when the installation is complete click Activate button to enable the plugin.
Step 2: Configure The Plugin
Now you’ll notice a new section on your WordPress dashboard menu called Rich Snippets. Click on this link to open the Schema Rich Snippets plugin settings page.
Switch over to the Customization tab to change the colors. When you add rich snippets to your blog posts, the information will appear in a box at the end of each post. This settings page lets you change the colors of that box.
And, if you have an online store, you can enable rich snippets for WooCommerce from here as well.
Step 3: How To Add Snippets In Posts
Adding rich snippets is easy.
Simply create a new post or edit an existing post. And then scroll all the way down in the editor to find the Configure Rich Snippet widget.
Choose what type of a post or page you’re making. And add the related info in the appropriate boxes.
Hit publish to save the changes. The rich snippets will now appear on your blog post.
Step 4: Give It A Test Drive
It could take some time for Google to index your blog posts and pages. So you can’t know for sure if you’ve included the right information in the rich snippets or if it plays by Google standards. Unless you test your links, of course.
You can test the rich snippets of your published posts using Google Structured Data Testing Tool. This tool will help you validate your rich snippets and find out if there are any errors in your snippets.
All you have to do is paste the URL of your published post and click the Run Test button. The test results will show you all the information about the rich snippets used in each link.
Conclusion
There you go! Your website and links will now look much more professional in Google search results. As always, don’t expect immediate results. Give some time for Google and other search engines to index and rank your pages. One thing is for sure that it will certainly help improve your SEO rankings and improve CTR.
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