When you hear about mark-up for a website and you instantly think “code,” you’re only partly right. Maybe even mostly right. Because this whole rich snippet mark-up process means helping search engines to understand the content in your HTML, while still keeping it user-friendly for us humans.
This extra bit of text that appears under search results is a very good thing for search engine ranking and your website SEO.
There’s hope, however, for anyone who dreads HTML code like it’s a giant, eight-legged arachnid. If you want a rich snippet mark-up for better search results without the hassle of code, read on.
WordPress Plugins for Simple Rich Snippet Mark-up
Google has adopted the schema.org method of mark-up for websites, which is a structured data standard of microdata for search engines to make sense of . For example, if you write a review, and you mark-up your website with schema, you’re teaching the search engines not only about the item you reviewed, but also that it was you specifically that reviewed it.
If you have a website or blog that could benefit from mark-up for a person, product, event, organization, movie, book, or review, then an easy way to do this is with Schema-creator.org.
This site helps you create a schema, or code. Then you take this schema code and copy and paste it to your site. Super simple, right? But what if your content doesn’t fall into any of those categories?
If you have an in-depth article then you’re in luck, because a new WordPress plugin was created to qualify your content for Google’s new In-Depth Article search results feature. (To learn more about this, check out Google’s Webmaster Tools on In-depth Articles.) By using the new In-Depth Articles Generator, your site will be automatically marked-up with metadata to better present your in-depth content as a potential candidate for this new rating.
If you’re still looking for options, there are two other WordPress plugins, All in One Schema.org Rich Snippets and Schema Creator by Raven. Both are limited in the item types you can choose from, but they are by far the quickest and easiest way, and there’s no eight-legged code spiders to worry about.
Rich Snippet Mark-up for Newbies
Finally, and perhaps the simplest way to mark-up your site with rich snippets is with Yoast’s WordPress SEO. For every post and page you generate, it gives you the option of creating a rich snippet. Although it doesn’t use microdata like schema.org, the word is – so far – that Google will continue to accept other forms for rich snippet mark-up.
For ranking purposes in search engine results, decide which way you will mark-up your website and gain some SEO advantage. This isn’t mark-up magic. It’s real and it’s going to affect your website.
Code spiders, on the other hand, aren’t real. In case you were worried.