June 4, 2017

Forget Meta Data. Let’s Take a Look at Micro Data.

Google is veritably a massive database. The entire web is scraped, poked and prodded to generate as much information on content and relevancy as possible. With the advent of semantic mark-up, you not only have the ability to give Google more information about what your content is, but you can expand your pages real estate on search engine result pages.

Marking-up content, or making “rich snippets,” is what enables search engines to show reviews, ratings, authors, additional links, and more within an organic search result. Like the more traditional meta data tags (title, description, etc.), rich snippet mark-up is added right into the <head> of your page’s HTML. Builtvisible has a great, in-depth blog post on the different ways to code and utilize rich snippet mark-up languages.

Although this is yet another area where Google will not equivocally state whether or not it contributes to search page rank, doing your own independent research will give you a pretty good idea. Go ahead and Google just about any query, and at the very least the top several organic results will display additional links underneath the meta descriptions. For larger-market, more competitive search queries, you’ll see blog author names, star ratings with numbers of reviews posted, and (mainly for branded search queries) additional site links with accompanying description text snippets.

You will often see these additional site links for your website even if you haven’t coded any mark-up snippets. That’s because Google is pushing for SERPs made of more content from fewer, higher-relevance results. Manually adding mark-up snippets is also a great way to control what Google displays, if you’re seeing additional data or site links that you don’t want shown. You can also deprecate certain links in Google Search Console.


For a little bit of effort and exploration, you can turn your site’s organic search results presentation into billboards with more page real estate and information than even paid advertising.

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