Rich snippets are microdata – HTML coded bits of information that make it easy for search engine crawlers to comprehend what searchers are inherently capable of inferring from your website without having to click through to the result.

Users will get more information, if Google collect more information from your Meta section and hence, one can have better targeting on web. Presently, Rich Snippets have capability of describing entities of several types such as products and offers, reviews, events, breadcrumbs, people, videos, recipes.

For an ecommerce website, in particular, Google displays the information available from a webstore’s Merchant Center product feed. This information can display product, price, availability, and product reviews.

Rich snippets are best used on ecommerce site that has a huge range of products. Through this service, it helps to improve the search engine ranking, better click through rates from search results, and enhance traffic for best conversion rates. For example, a restaurant with snippet might show the average review and price range; and an album with snippet could list the songs in the album with a link to play them. These rich snippets help users recognize the relevancy of their search and as a result, it gives more clicks to pages.

Some simple coding is needed, thus you don’t have to worry on the complicated coding. Microdata use very simple HTML tags, such as or tags to assign descriptive terms to each bit of information.

Here’s an example HTML block showing basic information about me:

<div>My name is Sunny Tay, and I was born and raised in New York.
I’m on the marketing team at HubSpot, an all-in-one marketing software company in Cambridge, MA.
Learn more here: <a href=””http://hubspot.com””>www.hubspot.com</a></div>

Here is the same HTML with microdata:

<div itemscope itemtype=”http://data-vocabulary.org/Person”>
My name is <span itemprop=”name”>Sunny Tay</span>, and I was born and raised in New York.
I’m the <span itemprop=”title”>Head of Prospect Marketing</span> at <span itemprop=”affiliation”>HubSpot</span>, an all-in-one marketing software company in Cambridge, MA.
Learn more here: <a href=”http://hubspot.com” itemprop=”url”>www.hubspot.com</a></div>

Below shows the different types of rich snippets and each of them are link to Google’s instruction on setting up each type of rich snippet.

The author snippet includes the author’s name, the author’s picture which appears on Google+, the followers, which the author has on Google +, links to more articles by that author.

Learn more on creating rich snippets for authors:
http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1408986

Rich snippet on business or organization can include location information, contact information, price ranges, hours, and customer reviews, if there are any available.

Learn more on creating rich snippets for organizations:
http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=146861

This includes the event’s time, date and location. Up to three events will be displayed if there is more than one.

Learn more on creating rich snippets on events:
http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=164506&topic=1088474&ctx=topic

In this, individual songs in an album or songs lycris will be display if available.

Learn more on creating rich snippets for music:
http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1623047&topic=1088474&ctx=topic

This function displays information such as a person’s job title, the company name and location. It can also display a photo, nickname and more.

Learn more on how to create rich snippets for people:
http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=146646&topic=1088474&ctx=topic

In here, it includes the product picture, rating and prices of the product.

Learn more on creating rich snippets for product:
http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=146750&topic=1088474&ctx=topic

Additional information is provided to users about the cooking recipe, rating and calorie information. However, to qualify as a recipe, at least two tags must be in place:

• A photo of the food
• Tag on prepare time, cook time, total time, or ingredients
• Calories
• Review

Learn more on creating rich snippets for recipes:
http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=173379&topic=1088474&ctx=topic

As till now, you have seen several snippets, and this one can be setup just review portion review snippets.

Learn more on creating rich snippets for reviews:
http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=172705&topic=1088474&ctx=topic

Thumbnail of a video can be displayed next to your search listing, using the video snippets. However the markup is a little different. Note: Google recognize facebook share as markup code.

Learn more on creating rich snippets for videos:
http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=162163&topic=1088474&ctx=topic