Google Rich Snippet

Hi,

In this I will be discussing about rich snippets, what they are and how can they be useful in SEO. One of my colleague was working on the same, and decided to share with me so I am posting it in. Rich snippets are simply few predefined attributes in HTML tags, which are treated in a special way by Google. Have a look at the following. This will make it simpler to understand what they are:

The above is screen shot from Google search results when I search by "yelp" keyword. In the above we see a star rating and total reviews received for that App. These information are not present in Google search results by default. To make this happen we need to use rich snippets. Rich snippets can be used to representing the following:

1. Reviews (as given above)
2. People
3. Product
4. Business
5. Recipe
6. Events

The rich snippets can be implemented in 3 ways:

1. Microdata
2. Microformat
3. RDF

Use(Code) & Explanation:

Optimizing your page to come up in Google search

Hi,

This is a continuation of my previous post. In this I will be highlighting few generic rules making your web page appreciable to search engine. The search is basically performed on keywords. Such as "PHP Books", where PHP and Books are two different keyword. You need to architect your website in such a way that these two keywords in your page makes sense to Google.

Here are 10 ways how and where you will use those keywords and optimizing your web page:

1. In META keywords. Not necessary but a good practice. Keep them short and max till 255 characters

2. In META description. Keep the keywords towards the left, but forming a complete meaningful sentence.

3. In the page title. In extreme left, but not the first word.

4. In a H3 tag or higher. Use only once H1 tag in a page and multiple H2, H3 etc. as needed

5. In page URL. Do not duplicate the keywords in URL. Try to use .html or .htm in URL's to be on the safe side. You can use .htacces to convert your .php or .aspx files look like .html/.htm files.

SEO Tip

Hi,

For a change I won't be submitting any source code in this post :), rather discuss a very favorite topic of mine, SEO. Search engine optimization is a very vast and a mystical thing. No one can teach you SEO, you need to find your own strategies. But there are always few basic basics, which I will be highlighting in this POST.
(All the points are in reference to Google search engine)

First why we need SEO?
Search engine optimization simply means building a website which can be found by various search engine, such that your website name shows up when a search is performed. If your website shows up in search results then your chances of bringing viewers to your site increases. Its a way to increase traffic to your site. And as we all know traffic is all we need for a websites success ;)

How do we put our website in search engines database?
Well this might not be such a difficult question to answer. Few basic steps you may take are:

1. Submit your URL to Google through http://www.google.co.in/addurl.html
2. Sitemaps:

Create a webmaster account for your website. For this you need to have a Gmail account. Login to that account and go to https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/ and add your website. But the job is not done yet, now you need to create sitemap xml files for the various pages in your website, upload it to your server and submit the URL for that file in the webmaster tools. After you have done that, Google will start scanning those URL's and index them.

Check out my earlier post for creating sitemaps or you can also refer to sitemaps.org for the format of the sitemap XML's.
You can also create the sitemaps for your website, using www.xml-sitemaps.com

Google Sitemaps - Indexing URL's in Google

Hi,

Google sitemaps are an excellent way to let google know about the various webpages of your website. By default the google will crawl your website once in a while, but if you create sitemaps and submit them to google, then the indexing gets speed up and also a lot of pages might get indexed in google search engine.

By the term sitemap, I am not referring to the general websites sitemap.html which tell you what are the links and what are the sub links inside the website. Google sitemaps is like a special xml file with predefined tags, each of which has an distinctive meaning. Here is a sample content of a sitemap.xml file:


<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<urlset xmlns="http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap/0.90">
  <url>
    <loc>http://www.url.com/</loc>
    <lastmod>2010-01-27T23:55:42+01:00</lastmod>
    <changefreq>daily</changefreq>
    <priority>0.5</priority>
  </url>
  <url>
    <loc>http://www.url.com/page1.html</loc>
    <lastmod>2010-01-26T17:24:27+01:00</lastmod>
    <changefreq>daily</changefreq>
    <priority>0.5</priority>
  </url>
  <url>
    <loc>http://www.url.com/page2.html</loc>
    <lastmod>2010-01-26T17:24:27+01:00</lastmod>
    <changefreq>daily</changefreq>
    <priority>0.5</priority>
  </url>
</urlset>

The given tags are predefined. <loc> contains the URL you want to index, <lastmod> is when the content was last modified, <changefreq> is how often its content gets changed and <priority> is how important is the file; where 1 is most important and .1 is least.