SEO Jargon Buster – Snippets and Rich Snippets

There is no end to the digital revolution and its constant flood of unique and often trending terminology. The dictionaries are often just as confused as we are and honesty, digital has its own language most of the time anyway. No industry is a better example than search engine marketing and in particular, SEO.It’s probably worth remembering that in the early days in which SEO became a genuine coding and marketing channel alongside web development, the majority of the authorities on the subject were confined to basement offices far from windows or day light and plugging away through the screen glare whilst downing consecutive energy drinks. So, I suppose we can cut them some slack for perhaps not always creating a channel blueprint with terminology we are always expected to understand.

Snippets are a good example of SEO terminology. To make things more interesting they come in two varieties, snippets and rich snippets. The difference we’ll cover shortly. First off, in SEO terms a snippet is the information from a website which is shown in the search results. Typically for a standard snippet this is the title of the web page in the result followed by the URL of the page and then an extract of text which by default is taken from the first body of text on the page.SnippetsYou can perform a Google search to see an example of this. Let’s try “Chocolate Milkshake”. As you’ll see the snippet contains the title of the web page in question, a breakdown of the URL showing the domain name at the start and an excerpt from the body of text that shows first on the page. A very standard and by modern standards, retro looking search result.Websites are coded to show search engines what information to collect to produce effective snippets like this. The page title, headers and body text will be coded into the HTML of the website itself making it easy for the engines to find and use. If your website isn’t providing these very basic details then it probably won’t rank at all and the engines won’t be able to quantify any of the required data to produce a listing. Rich snippets Rich snippets come in varying shapes and sizes but look something like this:As you’ll see, this is a much more captivating listing. As well as the information seen in a standard snippet, Google has recognised that this is a recipe-related search and provided us with what it knows is a recipe related page of content. We know this because it has also provided us with the ratings for the recipe, the time it takes to cook (make) and even the calories. Plus, a nice picture of the finished recipe/product. All information the engine knows users would like to see at a glance to decide if they want to click through.This rich snippet goes one further and provides related recipes from the site, taken from this page’s own internal links.Rich snippets can only be drawn from websites providing sufficient data within their HTML coding to allow engines like Google to easily find and extract this more detailed information. This all comes down to having a professionally built website which has been coded effectively.Whether or not you have enabled rich snippets to be collected by search engines effectively is not necessarily an indicator that your site will rank higher than other pages on the web for the same query, there are still many other SEO related factors to consider. But what rich snippets do provide is a more attractive listing that regardless of ranking is more likely to encourage clicks and in turn earn a higher click through rate versus standard listings. This means more traffic and potentially better rankings in the future.