Yesterday I wrote about the meta tags and how they may become redundant in the future. Google recently announced the release of rich snippets which supports this theory to some degree. Rather than using data found in meta tags, ‘Rich Snippets’ uses data that has been marked up in a particular fashion within the body of the content.

The mark up language used is either ‘microformats’ or ‘RDFa’ and is used to annotate content within a page. Google Webmaster Central has more information on the use of annotated content. What is important is to understand how it may help your web pages. The current use by Google is for people and review sites, however I can see it expanding in the future to include any pages that contain suitable data.

You can see in the following graphic how information from the page has been gathered and presented in the search results.

The process of annotating your page is not difficult – you simply add a few extra lines to your current code. These lines are hidden from the user but search engines along with other applications can read and act on the information contained. Google has several examples on the post that will give you an idea of how much extra code is required.

Will it benefit you as a webmaster? If you have a site that includes product reviews, or information on people then it may. Using the code will not guarantee its use in search results as Google is only rolling the system out gradually. They are also being careful to ensure there is no spamming of this new concept.

If your site, or some of your pages, do fall within the categories supported, it would be a good idea to include the code within the relevant pages as part of your SEO program. It won’t hurt your site and the extra information published in search results may just lead to more traffic. That has to be a bonus, particularly if your competition hasn’t bothered to include the code.

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This entry was posted on Monday, May 18th, 2009 at 1:30 am and is filed under Search Engines. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.