You’ll sometimes see results with “stars” under them in Google results. It’s because Google supports an open source mark-up described as “Rich Snippets”. Bing also supports them, but Yahoo doesn’t seem to from a cursory check I’ve made.  

Anyway, here’s an example I found today:

You can see the review stars showing up under the result for the CNET review of a great big telly.

By marking up your product pages with this new code, you may (if you’re really lucky) be able to get review stars to show up under your results too. But you’re definitely going to need to have reviews on each product or service, otherwise there’s no review to show!

Google’s been a bit slow to fully roll out support for Rich Snippets (even though they’ve been supporting it since about May 2009). But I also think some online retailers, hotels, restaurants etc, have also been slow to mark up their pages as well.

I think they’re very useful, as they draw the eye towards your search result, which in turn could lead to a higher volume of traffic to your products.

Most of the larger dedicated review sites in nearly all categories are fully supporting Rich Snippets, such as Trip Advisor for hotels, Yelp for restaurants and obviously CNETt for technlogy, to name a few.

And it’s not just reviews that you an mark up. Here’s an example of recipe Rich Snippets from GroupRecipes.com:  

You can also create snippets for People (as Linkedin has), events, businesses, movies (check IMDB) and (soon) products.

It’s not too onerous for a developer to introduce Rich Snippets to your page source code and there’s a very useful resource here. So ask your developer to introduce them to your pages if you have reviews. 

For more Online Sales expert advice, click here.

Chris Thomas heads up Reseo, a search engine optimisation  company which specialises in creating and maintaining Google AdWords campaigns and Search Engine Optimisation campaigns for a range of corporate clients.