How To Enhance Your SEO Performance With Rich snippets
Enhance Your SEO Performance with Rich snippets:
Rich Snippets give users convenient summary information about their search results at a glance. Google tries to present users with the most useful and informative search results. The more information a search result snippet can provide, the easier it is for users to decide whether that page is relevant to their search.
Understand Rich Data Format – RDFa & Microformats:
RDFa (or Resource Description Framework – in – attributes) is a W3C Recommendation that adds a set of attribute level extensions to XHTML for embedding rich metadata within Web documents.
A microformat is a web-based approach to semantic markup, seeks to re-use existing HTML/XHTML tags to convey metadata[1] and other attributes in web pages and other contexts that support (X)HTML, such as RSS. This approach allows software to process information intended for end-users (such as contact information, geographic coordinates, calendar events, and the like) automatically.
(More Definition & Theory on Wikipedia: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microformat & http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RDFa)
Google – RDFa & Mircroformats:
Google announced support for RDFa & Mircroformats in May, 2009. The following article will help you understand the concept behind blending Rich Snippets in SERPs
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/05/introducing-rich-snippets.html
How to USE RDFa & Microfmots in your Site:
Although “RDFa & Microfmots” syntax is easy to implement, kindly note that Google currently supports specific information types i.e. reviews, people profiles, business listings, and events.
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=99170
Thus as long as your concern is SERPs, restrict yourself to structure supported by Google.
RDFa & Microfmots Syntax Recommendation:
RDFa uses simple attributes in XHTML tags (often <span> or <div>) to assign brief and descriptive names to entities and properties. Here's an example of a short HTML block showing basic contact information for me.
<div>
My name is Mohsin Khawaja but people call me Mohsin. Here is my home page:
<a href="http://www.khmohsin.com">www.khmohsin.com</a>.
I live in Pakistan, Lahore and work as an Internet Marketing Manager at Alpolink
</div>
Here is the same HTML marked up with RDFa.
<div xmlns:v="http://rdf.data-vocabulary.org/#" typeof="v:Person">
My name is <span property="v:name">Mohsin Khawaja</span>,
but people call me <span property="v:nickname">Mohsin</span>.
Here is my homepage:
<a href="http://www.khmohsin.com" rel="v:url">www.khmohsin.com</a>.
I live in Pakistan, Lahore and work as an <span property="v:title">Internet Marketing Manager</span>
at <span property="v:affiliation">Alpolink</span>.
</div>
A useful discussion can be found on spyrestudios.com regarding RDFa and Microformats. However for practical use I will recommend Google Guidelines for using Rich Snippets in your site that can be found on the links below:
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/topic.py?topic=21997
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=99170
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/10/help-us-make-web-better-update-on-rich.html
Do Not Forget the Rich Snippet Testing Tool:
http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/richsnippets
Conclusion:
What I believe is that with Rich Snippets you can increase the CTR from Organic Search Results and also users will prefer your website against your competitors. Also Rich Snippets is a smarter way for e-commerce sites to display products, prices and reviews in SERPs. If you have implemented Rich Snippets in your site what's the response? can you share in comments below?