What Is The Rich Snippets Testing Tool?

First things first. What are rich snippets?

With rich snippets, webmasters with sites containing structured content—such as review sites or business listings—can label their content to make it clear that each labeled piece of text represents a certain type of data: for example, a restaurant name, an address, or a rating.

In other words, rich snippets are a way for webmasters to influence the search results to help Google rank their web pages appropriately for the right key phrases. So who can use them and what information is provided for rich snippets?

Who Can Use Rich Snippets?

Rich snippets are useful to a wide array of businesses and individuals. Authors, musicians, restaurants, event organizers, churches, small businesses, online merchants, and review sites could all benefit from rich snippets. In fact, Schema.org is a great resource for anyone who thinks that rich snippets could benefit their website’s SEO and reputation management efforts.

If you provide product reviews on your website, then rich snippets can help you improve your SEO. If you use a shopping cart to allow your customers to purchase products, you can improve your product descriptions with rich snippets. If you want to increase your authority as an author, a musician, or an actor, rich snippets can be helpful to your website’s ability to rank for the right key terms. If you run a local small business, rich snippets can assist you in getting your website ranked better for geotargeting and local address information.

As you can see, rich snippets serve a lot of useful purposes.

Google’s Rich Snippets Testing Tool

You could learn everything you need to know about rich snippets, but how would you know if they are working the way they should? That’s where the Google Rich Snippets Testing Tool comes in.

Google provides this tool so that webmasters can test their snippet data to see if they are being presented accurately in the search results.

If you’ll go to the testing tool and enter the web page you want to test in the box and click “Preview,” then you’ll see how Google presents you to searchers using your rich snippet information. You’ll see a Google search preview for the web page you are testing (NOTE: The tool is designed to test individual web pages, not entire websites).

The Rich Snippets Testing Tool will also tell you whether the web page you are testing is linked to your Google profile. And it will tell you if it is linked to the popular social networks. Additionally, you’ll be able to see extracted rich snippet data from your web page as well as what the data would like like to a custom search engine.

If you are concerned with your online reputation at all, then I highly recommend that you become familiar with rich snippets and the Google Rich Snippets Testing Tool.

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