May 25, 2016: Last week, Google introduced “rich cards” via a post to its Webmaster Central Blog.
Rich cards are an improved way of displaying Schema-formatted content. Until last week, this content appeared on results pages in a static “rich snippet” with a small thumbnail image (as seen in the center image, below). Now, a much larger image will accompany the listing, and this listing will float in a “carousel” that users can scroll through horizontally.
Right now, Google has rich cards working for just two categories: recipes and movies. But it’s highly likely that Google will bring this same functionality to other content categories, including Events, Products, and Reviews. So marketers – including e-commerce merchants, publishers producing review content, or firms running regular events – online and off — will want to get their web content ready.
Getting up to speed with Schema
If you’ve been lagging on applying Schema formatting to your content, fear not: it’s less difficult than it might seem, especially for WordPress users, who have many capable plugins available for that platform that can make the task easy.
One excellent Schema markup tool for WordPress-based publishers is the All in One Schema.org Rich Snippets plugin. Once installed, this free plugin adds a set of drop-down markup options to your WordPress posts, letting you easily classify them among a group of entities (Item Review, Event, People, Product, Recipe, Software Application, Video, or Service), describe them, and associate an image with them (this image can be different from that featured on the post itself).
Using Schema to correctly classify your content is a mission-critical SEO task. Doing so makes it easier for search engines to understand – and correctly classify – the content you publish, making it more likely to appear when a relevant query is executed, and making it more likely to be clicked upon once it appears. Google’s most advanced algorithms, including Rankbrain, and Hummingbird, use Schema — among other algorithmic factors — when making their ranking decisions.
Consequently, rich snippets have been showing up more frequently on results pages. As we noted earlier this month, about 20 percent of listings now show them. This is good for marketers who’ve implemented Schema, and good for users as well, who increasingly expect terse, visually-oriented summary descriptions to accompany SERPs listings.
As search results become increasingly image-oriented (a trend reinforced by Google’s recent decision to run paid ads in its Image areas) Schema markup will continue to be an effective way to make one’s important content stand out on results pages.
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