Google Announces Rich Snippets Progress

If the idea of influencing what shows up when your business appears as a search result on Google appeals to you, the search giant’s taken a step that should prove quite useful.  To be precise: Google’s added support for microdata for use in rich snippets.

Rich snippets can relate to things like reviews, people profiles, or events, making search results look more interesting (and actually be more informative).  You can find a longer explanation here, if that quick summary that doesn’t ring a bell.

As for the new development, the picture below shows what an HTML block looks like before and after the addition of microdata.  And a post on the Webmaster Central Blog explains, "As you can see, it’s easy to add markup to your pages using a few HTML attributes like itemscope (to define a new item), itemtype (to specify the type of item being described), and itemprop (to specify a property of that item)."

Also, "Once you’ve added markup to a page, you can test it using the rich snippets testing tool to make sure that Google can parse the data on your page."

So be sure to set about making rich snippets show for your site if you have a few spare minutes.  While this shouldn’t directly boost your search ranking, it may still lead to a lot more traffic.