How to Customize Rich Snippets to Drive Traffic to Your Blog

Snippets allow users to manage the content that is displayed in a tweet, status update or organic search. If snippet markup (HTML meta tags) is not present, the social network might display the content incorrectly.

03/21/2016 10:00:00 AM

However, there are many ways for marketers to optimize the snippet that appears on Google+ and other networks. Controlling Snippet Content Marketers can manage snippets for search listings and for all major social networks, including Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and LinkedIn, by adding meta tags to the page’s HTML codes and utilizing Twitter cards. This can be done manually, or through WordPress Plugins. To preview the current rich snippets for your blog post’s search listings, visit Google Webmaster Tools Rich Snippets and enter the post’s URL. Google will also identify whether the post contains Authorship and Publisher markup.

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How to Customize Rich Snippets to Drive Traffic to Your Blog

Headlines, topics, and images all play important roles in consumers’ engagement with an article. They affect both the article’s search engine ranking and the searcher’s decision on whether they choose to click on the article.

Marketers have tools at their disposal to control the content shown in a search listing or social network. To do this, they must optimize the post’s meta tags that control snippets.

For example, when you insert a link into Google+ without social snippet meta tags, Google+ displays only the title and URL by default and does not include a description of the article. Additionally, it will display the image from the link with the squarest dimensions.

However, there are many ways for marketers to optimize the snippet that appears on Google+ and other networks.

Controlling Snippet Content

Marketers can manage snippets for search listings and for all major social networks, including Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and LinkedIn, by adding meta tags to the page’s HTML codes and utilizing Twitter cards. This can be done manually, or through WordPress Plugins.

To preview the current rich snippets for your blog post’s search listings, visit Google Webmaster Tools Rich Snippets and enter the post’s URL. Google will also identify whether the post contains Authorship and Publisher markup.

WordPress users can download the following plugins that will add meta tags automatically in the post to optimize search listings and all social media content. Once the plugin is installed, users can manage the tags, title, author, description and image for each blog post as they create it.

All in One Schema.org Rich Snippets. This plugin gives users control over their tags for both social media and search listings for Google.
WP Open Graph Plugin. A tool that adds all of the Open Graph meta tags to content.

Managing Snippets Manually for Social Media

Manual editing is most useful for the more permanent pages on your website, like the home page, product description pages, newsletter subscription forms, etc. Melissa Addison Garza offers detailed instructions on optimizing snippets in Optimizing Social Link Snippets for Facebook, Twitter and Google+.

Facebook and Google+ Snippets

Facebook’s snippets include the image, title, domain and description. Google+, as mentioned above, only posts the title and URL by default. To customize these, use Open Graph Schemaformatting in the markup of your blog.

Google shares the code to embed in your blog’s HTML markup. Replace the domain name, title, image URL and source, and description where necessary.

<body itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Product">
  <h1 itemprop="name">Shiny Trinket</h1>
  <img itemprop="image" src="{image-url}" />
  <p itemprop="description">Shiny trinkets are shiny.</p>
</body>

Twitter Snippets

Twitter is different than Facebook and Google+ in that it requires markup for a Twitter Card.

Twitter offers a variety of card types for marketers to use, including customization for article summary, news provider, image size, image galleries, and app installs. Visit the Twitter Cards page to view all types.

Twitter offers a variety of cards to display URLS. The one shown above provides a link directly to app.

For WordPress users, creating Twitter cards for your content is easy: First, download the SEO Plugin by Yoast.

Under the SEO toolbar, click on “Social.” Then, click the box saying “Add Twitter card meta data” and enter your Twitter handle. Then, validate your account through Twitter.

If you don’t use WordPress, or you want to customize your card, follow Twitter’s process to create and validate cards.

Bottom line: Marketers can make content more shareable with rich snippets in search engines and social networks. It’s easiest to rely on a plugin to create these snippets for you, but customizing the tags manually gives marketers more freedom on the content they want displayed in each network.

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