by Claudia Bruemmer

Suppliers and Retailers have heard about the advantages of rich snippets and what an informative, detailed SERP listing can mean for traffic and conversions. While it can be a lot of work to use the correct formatting that results in these rich SERP listings, those who use WordPress can get a variety of free plug-ins that create the code for you.

Rich snippets allow users to decide whether or not they want to find out more about your products from the search results page. They can be used to show more information on Events, Products, Business Listings, reviews, Videos, etc., on your site.

Rich Snippets make it possible to label this information within your website source code through the use of Microdata, Microformats or RDFa formats to show Google that this information represents a certain type of data. Google has a Rich Snippets Testing Tool you can use to ensure you have entered the code correctly on your site.

By telling Google exactly what you offer searchers, you are helping them better recognize and display your information in search results. Rich Snippets are an excellent way to provide complete, optimized data to the search engines in order to enhance your listings in organic search result.

You can help Google by inserting Rich Snippets in your content with structured markup (schema microdata, microformats and RDFa). Below are some free tools for implementing this code on your documents if you use Word Press.

Microdata for WordPress: This free plug-in developed by Internet marketing company Optimum7 adds a button on the TinyMCE Editor (located in the Media Buttons Editor area) to help you generate HTML5 microdata code in your WordPress documents. You merely have to choose the type of data you want and the properties of the data type and then fill in the values. As you know, the types of schema data are: Event, Person, Organization, review, Place and Product. You can get more information on this microdata plug-in here, and you don’t have to know how to code to use this plug-in. You can download the Microdata for SEO plug-in here.

Schema For WordPress: This plug-in will mark up the existing content in your WordPress blog. After installation, activate the “Schema for WordPress” button in front of the place where you wish the code to be placed, choosing appropriate items from the drop-down menu for the properties. For more information on Schema for WordPress, click here.

SEO Ultimate WordPress Plug-In, Rich Snippet Creator Module: SEO Design Solutions created a very popular SEO Ultimate Plug-In that has a module for creating rich snippets. However, it only applies to the Event schema data type. For more information, click here.

Another tool that is not specifically for WordPress and can be used on any website is described below.

Raven’s Schema Creator: Raven released a new tool for easily creating HTML with schema.org microdata called the Schema Creator. Structured data helps search crawlers make sense of the content in your HTML. If you find schema.org a little difficult to understand, Schema Creator can help you build structured data. Once you create a schema, you can copy and paste the code to your site or add additional item properties to it. For more information on Schema Creator, click here.

You can use any of the resources above to implement rich snippets on your pages, which is particularly advantageous for suppliers and retailers. Buyers can get a lot more information on their product queries and you can get a lot more traffic and conversions by using rich snippets, microdata, RDFa and any other type of structured data.