We recently discussed microformats and microdata, and today we’ll expand a bit more on this topic.
All of us are probably interested in improving our click through rates (CTR) from the search engine results pages (SERPs), and one excellent way to do this is to use microformats. They are Β a set of agreed uponΒ HTMLΒ conventions used to describe content, can give you more control of theΒ snippetsΒ displayed in GoogleΒ SERPs.
Using microformats we can thus implement rich snippets on our page, and hopefully these will be picked up by Google and displayed in the search results, enhancing our listing.
So how do we get to implement microdata on our website?Β An easy way is of course through the use of plugins, and here are a few good ones:
WP Customer Reviews
There are many sites that are crawling for user-generated reviews now, including Google Places and Google Local Search. WP Customer Reviews allows you to setup a specific page on your blog to receive customer testimonials for your business/service OR to write reviews about multiple products (using multiple pages).
- WP Multisite and Multiuser (WPMU / WPMS / WordPress MU) compatible.
- All submissions are moderated, which means that YOU choose which reviews get shown.
- Reviews are displayed to visitors in a friendly format, but search engines see the hReview microformat (and RDFa soon!)
- Multiple anti-spam measures to prevent automated spambots from submitting reviews.
- Provides a configurableΒ
Business hCard
, to help identify all pages of your site as belonging to your business. - Completely customizable, including which fields to ask for, require, and show.
- Shortcodes available for inserting reviews and review form on any page or widget.
- Works with caching plugins and a majority of themes.
- Includes an external stylesheet so you can modify it to better fit your theme.
- Reviews can be edited by admin for content and date.
- Admin responses can be made and shown under each review.
- Support for adding your own custom fields.
- The plugin can be used on more than one page, and can be used on posts.
- Supports bothΒ
Business
Β andΒProduct
Β hReview types. - Shows aggregate reviews microformat (
hReview-aggregate
). - Fast and lightweight, even including the star rating image. This plugin will not slow down your blog.
- Validates as valid XHTML 1.1 (W3C) and valid Microformats (Rich Snippets Testing Tool).
- And much more…
Rich Contact Widget
This contact widget comes with enhanced markup for microdatas & microformats, so that search engines can use it in their search results. They can help display contact informations about your business or yourself below your website in search results, and even a map with your location.
The telephone & email are linked so that visitors can click on it and make a call (through mobile or skype) or send a mail from their computer or their mobile devices.
You can also display a static image map of your location, linking to the address’ Google Maps page, and display a download link for a vCard.
Schema Creator
Provides an easy to use form to embed properly constructed schema.org microdata into a WordPress post or page. It can be used to add any kind of microdata and is thus one of the most flexible plugins out there. It’s also developed by two top WordPress developers so it’s a good bet to try it out.
The official microformats websites also maintains a listing of related WordPress plugins, which you can check out for more plugins.
You can also test your page to see if you have implemented microdata correctly here using the Google rich snippets checker tool.
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24 Responses
thanks
can we combine more than 1 snippets?
hi can we use more than 1 snippets at the same time? I tird to add review snippet for www.thebitesizeconcepts.com plus the map snippet like this
Can I add 2 or more ina single website?
Is it possible to add images that shows in seacrh results. I have seen in many
My blog working well with All In One Schema.org Rich Snippets . It’s very simple
Jean
I am a Webmaster and I am mostly doing WordPress Websites for Businesses.
I donβt have that much content text on those Websites and I donβt do any posting.
I just put on those Wensites 200 to 250 Word articles. Just the Business Big lines.
Will the Google Authorship Markup help me in those Websites CRT.
Thanks for your time,
Cheers..
I wanted to display picture and not rating in search results. I tried some plugins but they display ratings. Now that your page displays your picture in search results. How did you do that?
Thanks for your article Jean. I wrote my own Rich Snippet Plugin in the end of the last year because I was fascinated about the possibilities. It’s called the Rich Snippets WordPress Plugin. Unfortunately it wasn’t out when this post was first published π
But it’s definitely worth a look. I also have some other Rich Snippet Plugins on my website as well as a theme. Here I wrote a blogpost about What Google can extract from my website.
Maybe this will help some of you guys π
Thanks for the article. I manage several WordPress sites and am considering adding rich snippets as part of the overall onpage search engine optimization strategy. Your article was informative and helpful on the topic.
I think the snippets are great if used properly, but can be a little much for a novice. I recommend that unless someone is really familiar with implementing them or does not really care what their site displays in the SERP’s that they hire an outside consultant.
Do you know a star rating with review plugin I can use in a page using a shortcode or in a widget?
Thanks mate for a great post.
I’ve been playing around with several plugins for the last couple of hours from different blog like yours, trying to get an image to display in Googles Rich Snippet Testing tool. I basically want to have a headshot of me to be associated with all pages on one of my sites. On another site with heaps of posts, I’m wondering if it’s possible to have different images associated with each post. Is this possible?
Which plugins do you feel is the best to achieve each?
Thanks for your time
Hi Brad, I use WordPress SEO by Yoast for this purpose, bear in mind that it takes some time for the headshot to show up in Google results.
I ended up having to start a google + page for each website. The test tool showed the images showing up but they aren’t coming up yet on Google. I’ll check out the SEO plugin you’re talking about. I’m happy with ‘All in One SEO’ for now though. I’m assuming it would be a pain to change over to another SEO plugin yeah?
It’s probably a waiting game now then, until Google decides to show them. It’s fairly easy to change over to WordPress SEO since I believe it has an importer facility.
eklentiyi yapamadΔ±m
How to use this plugin please please please please tell me π waiting for your valuable reply π
Kia Ora Jean,
Thanks for this article. Our therapy center has two addresses, one in San Francisco, and the other in Menlo Park. On Google search results, only the SF address comes up as a rich snippet, and as an SEO amateur I’m trying to figure out the best way/plugin to have the Menlo park address included too.
Any ideas? Thanks!
I’m not sure about that to be honest Sarah, if they are both using the correct markup, maybe Google only picks up the one it considers to be the main address? Although with so many businesses having multiple addresses, that wouldn’t really make a lot of sense.
Hi jean, i have activated snippets from webmaster tools…
I want my search page to look like this
site – [Redacted]
Our site – [Redacted]
Please search both urls in google so that u can know the difference.
I want google to do the same for our site.
Thank you
He’s not offering a free service here. He’s giving you the info. Learn it, appreciate it and run with it.
Travis.. I notice that Jean never had to reply above. It looks like you took care of the issue for him there.
Soda- I made a search for both in Google and i believe you are looking to have “in-links” this can be controlled in webmaster tools. You also would need to add authority to your site via links from other sites. Once you do both you will have what you want.
HI , i am using yoast seo, Is it possible get rich snippets via shortcodes?
Not as far as I am aware.