Rich snippets (Schemas) or semantic markups is now the new SEO trend especially for blogs and news websites.
In this blog and the following blogs we will talk about the most important semantic markups.
one of the most important semantic markups (or rich snippets schemas) is:
Authorship Semantic Markup / Authorship Rich Snippet
If you do not know it or not familiar with the term, Authorship Semantic Markup or Authorship Rich Snippet allows your personal photo to appear with pages you author, and your website, when they are listed in search engine results.
How to apply it?
Simply use the following semantic markup:
<a href=”[profile_url]?rel=author”>Your Name</a>
eg:
a href=”https://plus.google.com/111921947362490831344?rel=author”>Mina Younan</a>
The result will be something like that:
Some Guidelines for a Good Avatar
- Use of color. A splash of something bright helps draw the eye in otherwise monotonous SERPs – just like our eyes are trained to see the yellow/gold of review stars. My own photo performed best with a red or yellow/orange background.
- Right-facing (eyeline towards the search results) is better than left-facing, which tends to draw the users eye away from the page. Straight into the camera is another good choice.
- Attractiveness can’t be denied. I have a suspicion that attractive women photos do very well with certain demographics. See Felicia Day below.
- For some reason I prefer real backgrounds instead of a studio look. By placing the 2nd lawyer above in a real setting, he projects an air of authority that isn’t staged.
IMPORTANT: Each time you insert semantic markup, be sure to check it using Google’s Structured Data Testing Tool
