The latest buzz in the SEO world has the surround sound on the topic of “Semantic Web and Semantic Search”. This is the next step of the ever evolving SEO and it brings in an era where SEO’s have to give importance to microformats, schemas and go beyond the word to word mapping and focus on the meaning of the content of the website and try to correlate it with the meaning of the query being searched on the search engine.
The search engines have been working on semantic search since the advent of web 2.0. Google also has been supporting and promoting content by displaying the Rich Snippets in the search results.
Some of the type of content given priority by Google for Rich Snippets display in SERPs is:
Reviews
People
Businesses and organizations
Recipes
Events
Video
Yesterday , Google has announced the Product Rich Snippets too. The Rich Snippets Tool which verifies the structured data markup has been upgraded to support HTML Input also.
Rich snippets help you to:
- Attract potential buyers while they are searching for items to buy on Google.
- Submit your product listings for free.
- Control your product information. You can maintain the accuracy and freshness of your product information, so your customers find the relevant, current items they're looking for.
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If you're a merchant, you can give Google detailed product information we can use to display rich snippets (for example, price, availability, and review ratings) right on our search results pages. (Right now, shopping rich snippets appear on search results pages only in the US—but we're working hard to make them available everywhere.)
Rich Snippets: Product Search
Product markup allows you to provide Google with specific information about the products on your site. Information about price, availability, reviews and more may be used in search results to help users more quickly and accurately identify relevant content. Visit http://www.schema.org/Product for more details.
More details on the Product Rich Snippets on http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=146750
A Product can include an Offer or Offer-aggregate; or an Offer or Offer-aggregate can include one or more Products. Use the structure that works best for your content.
A Product snippet should have details about :
- Name Of The Product
- The Image Of The Product
- The Brand Of The Product
- The Category Of The Product
- Review About The Product
- Identifier Which Includes Brand and Product Identification
- Offer Details
Rich snippets add the logical meaning to the data and support semantic search but, just because the content on the page is expressed in mark up which supports the rich snippets and has been verified by the snippets tool, it is not certain to rank in the SERPs unless it is inter-linked by various quality signals from the social and the meta web.
Hence the SEOs now apart from the other on-page factors have to ensure that that atleast the content related to products, reviews, people, recipies, Address (using hCard) video, business and organizations are represented in the correct markup which has a potential to generate a rich snippet in SERPs and search visibility on various search options.
