From Microdata & Schema to Rich Snippets: Markup for the Advanced SEO

Hi everyone, this is Siddharth and I am back Live from Seattle SMX West. This session is about microdata & rich snippets and their ability to boost click thru rates (CTR). The speakers are, Julia Gause (Director SEM at Scripps Network), Stephan Spencer (CEO at Koshkonong LLC) & Marcus Tober (CTO at Searchmetrics).

Essentially all of them were mainly talking about the fact that rich snippets have the ability to increase your CTR massively. Julia works with the food.com network. She says that they have used rich snippets like reviews, rating etc to boost their site traffic immensely. She says rich snippets work & if the audience wants to take their site to the next level then implementing rich snippets is a must.

Stehphan Spencer uses Zappos.com as an example and shows they have implemented video markup.
Go to this link from Google for more information on video markup
https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/162163

Stephan tells the audience that there are 3 ways of implementing rich snippets. You can markup with Yahoo! SearchMonkey, you can do it through schema.org and you can also do it through Facebook markup. Scehma.org is the one which most people are inclining towards as it is easy to follow and it was invented by the search engines. But you can use any of the 3 ways described above.

The most important rich snippets you need to leverage specifically are breadcrumbs, reviews and ratings. He believes these are the top 3 although you could also use product offers and events. Actually there are lots of them. He also mentions the Google Data Highlighter which is a new introduction by Google and can be found in Google Webmaster Tools.

Marcus Tober also talks about examples of IMDB & Rotten Tomatoes and how each of them have added rich snippets. So folks again rich snippets was the main focus of this session.

More information about rich snippets and structured data can be found in Google Webmaster Tools:
https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/99170

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