Everyone knows that a high placing of your website in Google’s search results is fundamental for attracting relevant traffic. It is reported that the first page of Google accumulates up to 92% of all clicks (Shelton, 2017). Therefore, it is important to optimize your website to the Google Algorithm. This of course is not new information, after all it is hardly necessary to explain that SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization anymore.
The real question, however, is how to optimize your website. And in order to answer this question, you must first have a basic understanding of how Google’s algorithm works. Google uses ‘crawlers’, a piece of software that continuously and automatically searches through websites, to determine the subject and category of these websites. It scans for titles, keywords, subtitles, images, etcetera. Now if you would have a website for baking apple pie, you might think you should just use the word ‘apple pie’ as much as possible, with a lot of pictures of apple pies as well. A more intelligent way to help your cause, however, would be to structure your data to make it more readable for the crawlers. This structured data, or rich snippets are lines of code, that Google approved as a matter of SEO.
Examples of such snippets are a ‘recipe element’ or a ‘review element’, which will help better recognizing the Google Algorithm that your website provides a recipe and how well it has been received. When someone then searches for ‘apple pie recipe’ Google will first show all recipes, ordered by their popularity and review rating, before showing the websites as usual. Like so:
If you want to know more about the wide variety of snippets you can use for your website, check out https://developers.google.com/search/docs/guides/search-gallery.
