What in the World are Snippets and Rich Snippets?

What in the world are snippets and rich snippets? There is no end to the digital revolution and its constant flood of unique and often trending terminology. Dictionaries are often just as confused as us 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, 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. And 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. For a standard snippet this is the title of the web page, the URL of the page and then an extract which by default is taken from the first body of text on the page.

Snippets

You can perform a Google search to see an example of this. Let’s try “Chocolate Milkshake”. The snippet contains the title of the web page, the URL and an excerpt from the body of text. 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. The search 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. As a result, this is a much more captivating listing. Let’s take a recipe as an example. As well as the information seen in a standard snippet, Google has recognised that this is a recipe-related search. It has provided us with what it knows is a recipe related page of content. We know this because it has provided us with the ratings, the cooking time and even the calories. In addition, it has 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. Rich snippets go one step 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.