SEO is no longer the preserve of secretive alchemist who know closely guarded secrets of how to rank your website high in Google. Since Google has shifted its position of working again SEO to actually encouraging website owners to rank their site better, search engine optimisation has become easier with webmaster who can invest some time into reading the info Google is putting out their reaping the rewards in the form of increased traffic.

This post is a follow on from our early post on the basics of ranking high in Google.com.ng. This article explore how to use rich snippets to make your site stand out from a crowded SERP by using this Google approved technique.

The trick of using rich snippets effectively is to target specific queries such as ‘restaurant in Ikeja’, ‘how to cook jollof rice’ and other specific keywords or key phrases. This article shows you a step – by – step guide to enriching your website and enhancing its ranking in Google Nigeria with rich snippets.

You need basic knowledge of HTML, you will not be coding in HTML, you just need to be able to identify sections of your web page when view with an HTML editor.
You can also use site such as schema.org which can help you create very attractive snippet for your site. Breadcrumb can help a user to understand and to navigate hierarchy of the site. Breadcrumb has a number of different properties:

Here is what your HTML code should look like:

  • title -> breadcrumb title
  • url -> breadcrumb url
  • child -> next breadcrumb in the hierarchy.

The HTML code will look:

<div id=”snippets”>
<div xmlns:v=”http://rdf.data-vocabulary.org/#”>
<span typeof=”v:Breadcrumb”><a href=”/” rel=”v:url” property=”v:title”>Haba Naija</a> › </span>
<span typeof=”v:Breadcrumb”><a href=”http://forums.habanaija.com/#nigerian-webmaster-forum” rel=”v:url” property=”v:title”> Number ❶ Nigerian Webmaster Forum</a> </span>
</div>
</div>

Once you create a HTML code for your site you can check it using google rich snippets testing tool. This tool allows you to check not only HTML code you have created but also when you add this code to the site you can make sure that it looks right.

Below you can see the breadcrumbs for http://forums.habanaija.com