Use of Microdata To improve Product Visibility

[johngwms]

Has anyone added microdata to existing product layouts? It looks like a good way to improve SEO and make entries in organic SERPs stand out from the competition.

If so, any tips etc from the experience would be welcome.

John Legg

[Mike Hughes]

Hi John,

Can you explain what you mean? I haven't a clue what microdata is.

Mike

[johngwms]

Microdata is a method of tagging key information about a product such as Brand, price, description etc. Google and other search engines then use this information to better classify products in its search results.

It is also referred to as rich snippets. Here is a useful link to Google's description of rich snippets:

http://support.google.com/webmasters...0#product_page

Another benefit is the improved display of search results which makes the pages linked stand out from the rest. For example, review results are displayed as orange stars. This is just one form of rich snippet. Others include breadcrumbs etc for product results.

I believe that Actinic may now utilise rich snippets!

John

[Duncan Rounding]

I've done this with contact details but not with products. It shouldn't be difficult to set up and give it a try.

[johngwms]

I am quite willing to give it a try. I wondered if the effort would be repaid by the benefits. Maybe its too early to get such feedback from other users.

I would expect Sellerdeck to incorporate this as standard - maybe something for the wish list?

John

[Mike Hughes]

OK. Looking at it I can see that it might help but on the whole I'm sceptical. Google's whole focus for products is to get you tied into their paid advertising, so microdata about categories, MPNs, price, image, etc strikes me as being something that Google are unlikely to include in the standard serps as it's essentially replicating the shopping product feed data.

Product review info might be helpful.

The concept of microdata sounds like a technical suggestion that the engineers have produced, along the lines of "if the website owners can specify the product details on the page then we won't need a product feed from them." The problem is that from a commercial perspective Google want a product feed as it's the only way for them to link the product data to an adwords account.

Mike

[MDN]

I set it up on bedsbbq, but it made no difference in terms of SEO, but for the sake of a few tags who knows, better off IMO to use product reviews and mark them up in rich snippets, may not help with SEO but does make the site stand out in search results if competitors dont use it.

[johngwms]

Thank you Lee

Can you please give me an example of what you mean by a Product Review?

John

[MDN]

Hi John,

The best option is either sign up to use Feefo, and set it up within Sellerdeck, thatnks to them this is now included and just needs to be activated, or for a one off charge use Soapbox from:

http://www.codepath.co.uk/soapbox_info.htm

This is what I use on all sites I run and maintain, I think it now is set up for rich snippets, however if not a post of mine here may help:

http://community.sellerdeck.com/showthread.php?t=52880

Then your search results once G has re-crawled will include the star ratings that have been provided by your customer reviews, it may do a little for seo as reviews will also contain keywords, but from a natural search result view, if competitors are not using it your result will pop out from the crowd.

[johngwms]

Thanks Lee.

In fact I have been using Feefo for a few years now and , yes, the increased visibility this gives our results is beneficial.

I was looking more SEO advantage when promoting individual products and product types.

John

[chickenhouseman]

i use microdata.

I have soapbox and that produces the data for the product reviews. I worked it out myself sometime ago but notice it's now included as an option in the latest version.

i also have this dropped into the product layout

<!-- rich snippets BEGIN -->
<div itemscope itemtype="http://data-vocabulary.org/Product">
<meta itemprop="currency" content="GBP" />
<meta itemprop="price" content=<actinic:variable name="ProductPriceRaw" /> />
<meta itemprop="brand" content="<actinic:variable name="brand" />" />
<meta itemprop="image" content="<actinic:variable name="CatalogURL" /><actinic:variable name="SectionImageFileName" />" />

<meta itemprop="condition" content="new">
<meta itemprop="identifier" content="<actinic:variable name="gtin" />" />
<meta itemprop="category" content="<actinic:variable name="google_product_category" /> "/>
<meta property="og:type" content="product" />
<meta property="og:title" content="<actinic:variable name="ProductName" />" />

<meta property="og:url"
content="<actinic:variable name="SectionPageName" />" />
</div>
<!-- Rich snippets END -->

[johngwms]

Great - thanks Simon. I will give this a try.

John

[chickenhouseman]

brand and google category is a variable that I set up, later versions of actinic have the equivalent included so you may have to rename to suit, or leave those lines out

[jont]

I have used them on a couple of sites. I think they are still underused at the moment as there have been several flavours of code out there. Now Google is throwing them out into the mix they may get ratified into a consistent format. Not sure about immediate effects but long term as they become more popular they will become and important part of SEO strategy.

Their usage depends on the site and the products being offered in to whether you will see any immediate / future benefit. There are lots of sub categories which you can make use of and one I started work on for a food site uses the recipe tags to list ingredients and methods etc.

[jont]

brand and google category is a variable that I set up, later versions of actinic have the equivalent included so you may have to rename to suit, or leave those lines out

Yep - you can recycle a number of the existing variables but some will require a a UDV setting up to populate the fields correctly. The Google microformats route recycles a lot of their existing product feed variables which makes a refreshing change