Explained : How to Implement Rich Snippets Effectively.

[Edit Notes: In the first part of this series, we showed you why rich snippets can make all the difference to your startups website. In this part, Jitendra Agrawal writes on the various tools and resources used for implementing rich snippets.]

Learning what rich snippets are and what they can do is very handy. However, learning about it is not enough if; rich snippets need to be implemented properly to make the most of them.

A simple way to check for rich snippets is using Google’s Webmaster Tools. Simply add the site URL [Green Arrow] and then click on Preview [Brown Arrow].

In the above screenshot, we can see that the site doesn’t have rich snippets implemented [Highlighted Red Box]. Also, we can see that site’s Google Authorship and Publisher tag are missing.

Rich snippet mark-up can be added in various ways. One option is to simply add the mark-up text to the HTML code. Another option is to install plugins, depending upon the CMS used.

Once the rich snippets have been implemented, the structured data testing tool can be used to test and ensure that the mark-up can be read and extracted by search engines.

A number of tools can be found on Schema.RDFS.org, designed to help webmasters create and implement mark-ups, resulting in better display of search results. Here are a few more resources that are equally handy and helpful:

https://github.com/edsu/rdflib-microdata (Python)
https://pypi.python.org/pypi/uwosh.snippets/0.8.3a (Python)
https://github.com/divio/djangocms-snippet (Django)

With these resources at your disposal, implementing rich snippets becomes a breeze. As we have seen in Part I, rich snippets are highly beneficial and the very little effort required to implement them can yield excellent results.

[Guest article by Jitendra Agrawal, CTO at WebSmith Technologies Pvt. Ltd. You can follow him on twitter @jiten]