You might have seen star ratings in search results while looking for movie and
software reviews in Google. These star ratings are inserted by the particular websites using
rich snippets. Google announced the
support for rich snippets long back in 2009. Rich snippets are intended to give extra information about an article; like author,
publishing date, rating, price, etc. Wonder how you could add it your website? Well, if you are a blogger using
WordPress platform you may add rich snippets to your posts using a plugin.
The plugin is called SEO
Ultimate. And as the name indicates it’s an SEO plugin for
WordPress and alternative to All in One SEO and Platinum SEO. SEO Ultimate is better than the aforementioned plugins as it provides a lot of SEO options, and of course the option for star ratings using the rich snippets.
You can
install the SEO Ultimate plugin from within the WordPress dashboard and use the inbuilt tool to transfer SEO data from All in One SEO plugin. However, you might need to use SEO data transfer plugin in case you are using a plugin other than AIO SEO. Remove the exiting SEO plugin after
the complete installation of SEO Ultimate. Now you will find the
star rating option under SEO setting sub-section of your WordPress post editor. You can select suitable rating, and this would appear in Google’s search results through rich snippets.
Test view your rich snippet enabled result in Google using this
tool.
An article with star rating and additional information would get more visibility and CTR in search engines. However, adding rich snippets doesn’t guarantee their inclusion in Google search results. Google selects the appropriate sites on the basis of certain quality parameters. However, they might expand this feature in a wide manner very soon. So adding them now would help your blog in the future.
