Resource Description Framework or RDF has been around for a decade. Effective today, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) announced that RDF has now become a recommendation.
This is big news for webmasters and SEO’s since search engines have come forward and announced a universal way to markup data for better results pages.
Adding RDF to your website will allow search engines to display your data in a more visually appealing way and, in most cases, will lead to a higher CTR (click-through rate). In this example, taken from Google’s support page, we see that multiple events become available in a search results page.
Notice that under the link to the main URL there are three site links for different events on certain dates. This can be achieved by using the provided rich snippets for events found on schema.org.
Another example of how RDF affects a site is via Reviews and Ratings. Here is another example, taken from Google’s support page, showing what a marked up review may look like in the SERPs:
The additional coding required to achieve these results are relatively easy to implement. A few extra tags surrounding your HTML are all that is required.
With real estate on the search results pages becoming increasingly more competitive, your best chance of standing out is to have something that sets you apart from the competition. Implementing RDF is a great way to get noticed.
Tell us your stories of how adding rich snippets to a website has increased traffic and CTR.
