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:
Here is the same HTML with microdata:
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.