Rich snippet is a technique of showing a brief content of the page which has been listed by a search engine as a result of any search run by the user. You would have noticed that when we search for something over the internet using a search engine, almost all the results have a brief description of the information which you will view on opening the link. Rich snippets are very useful while searching for any product or service as they provide the reviews and rating of that site. It also comes handy when we search for people because we can differentiate among similar names by going through the snippet.
Google being the best search engine available these days has its own way of displaying these snippets and certain modifications are required while developing/appending the content of any website so that it is displayed along with the link in the results page. To display a rich snippet, Google looks for markup formats that you can easily add to your own web pages.
While writing this content it is presumed that you are familiar with the working and administration of wordpress. Till now wordpress users were required to add hReview code to their posts to let Google display the review data, but this required editing of the wordpress theme. In this article we will tell you how to add Google rich snippet to your wordpress powered website without editing the theme.
Step1- Install the SEO Ultimate plugin from http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/seo-ultimate/. If you want you may go to http://www.seodesignsolutions.com/wordpress-seo/ and enter your posts URL in the Auto Installer Field for auto-installing the plugin.
Step2 – once installed, activate the SEO plugin. On activation you will find there are many more SEO features available but you can disable them and enable only Rich Snippet functionality.
Step3- Open the post that you would like to mark as a review in the wordpress editor’s administration interface.
Step4- Under the content editor there is box titled “SEO Settings”. In SEO Settings box you will find a dropdown titled “Rich Snippet Type”. Select “Review” in this dropdown.
Step4- if you have to give a rating to the product you reviewed then select the most appropriate star rating from the drop down.
Step5- Click on “Save Changes” to save your post.
Given above were 5 simple steps for adding Google Rich Snippet in your wordpress post without editing the theme of your site. To check the functioning of SEO Plugin in your post you can enter your post’s URL on http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/richsnippets. This website is a tool provided by Google to let you see how your site would appear in Google search results.
