SEO with Rich Snippets
Have you performed a search in Google and seen the five star review rating with a result? Do you want your results to show the same? The five star review you see in Google’s results is due to having rich snippet code inserted on a web page. There are many different forms of rich snippets that Google will display in their results. Today we will discuss, how to get a five star review in Google’s results.
There are many different rich snippet code you can have within your HTML code to display different reviews. The most common, and easiest to setup is aggregate voting. This allows a user to vote on your product or service giving a score, either out of 5 or 10. You can set this up manually be installing the below code on your products web page:
10″> out of 9 – based on 12 ratings. 12 user reviews!
The above code will trigger Google’s spiders to generate the rich snippets code, which will display 9/10 based on 12 customer reviews. This is not the easiest way to generate review rich snippets. Every time there is a new review, you will need to edit this code and work out the average score from all the reviews submitted. If you have multiple products, which most E-commerce websites do, then you will be constantly updating your review code.
WordPress Plugin for Rich Snippets Star Rating
If you are using a WordPress website, there are many plugins available for your to use. These plugins will automatically generate and update your rich snippets code every time there is a new review. One of the better plugins to generate rich snippet codes for your web pages is GD Star Rating. There are many plugins that all have the same functionality and generate the same rich snippet code.
Ideally, you need to select a plugin that will generate a sliding star gauge. This will allow users quick and easy ratings of your product by selecting how many starts out of 5, or 10 depending on your settings. Instead of displaying 9/10 based on 12 customer reviews, the plugin will display, 9/10 based on 12 votes. There is no real difference between reviews and votes to the user or to your SEO and rankings. This saves time for the user as they are only required to click a button to submit their review, instead of manually writing a full review about your product. There are WordPress plugins out there as well which will generate rich snippet coding from clients reviews. Using the voting system is a lot quicker and easier.
Article By seo3d.org Director of SEO. Please follow on twitter for more quality SEO Blog posts.