Wonder how your post got clicked?
There are several reasons, but one thing is for sure, one of the reasons is this catchy, full-packed, and short sentence on your search query called featured snippets.
Google News, which launched in 1997, was originally a simple aggregator of news websites; the company later added online search, creating a news portal. A feature that displays information from Google’s Knowledge Graph in response to an inquiry without an explicit request for such information. Featured snippets are similar to auto-complete in that they automatically provide related answers and terms when someone starts typing into the search field.
Featured snippets are snippets of information that appear on the search engine results page. They are designed to answer a user’s question without them having to click on a result. The rich snippets are also called featured snippets or knowledge panels, and they are usually shown when you search for something on Google. Google has been rolling out changes to the SERP, and the way rich snippets are displayed. There is now a dedicated section in Google for displaying Rich Snippets called “Featured Snippets.”
Featured snippets can be seen as an extension of Google’s Knowledge Graph, which provides answers to factual questions directly in the search results.
How Featured Snippets Work?
Featured snippets are a type of search result that Google displays in response to certain queries. They are designed to provide quick answers to questions. The featured snippet is the answer to the user’s question, and it is usually displayed as a box at the top of the search results page.
The box contains a summary of the answer, extracted from an authoritative source such as Wikipedia or Google’s own knowledge graph, with a link to the full article.
The featured snippet is typically a one-sentence answer, which has often been considered to be too short to be meaningful. Google recognized that this is not the case and in 2009, they launched an algorithm that would evaluate the quality of the snippets and determine whether or not it was worth showing them at all. The algorithm analyzes both the snippet’s content and its position on the search results page.
Featured snippets are created by Google’s algorithm, which uses a variety of factors to determine which answer is most likely to be useful to you. The algorithm considers many factors, including:
-The content of the webpage that you’re on
-The words in your query
-The words on the webpage that you’re looking for an answer from
-Your location
On March 18, 2016, Google announced that they will begin to demote “low-quality” featured snippets in favor of expanded content from Wikipedia and other trusted sites. The process is similar for Wikipedia as well: if a page has low engagement or many errors, it will be demoted.
Types of Featured Snippets
People also search for: these snippets show up when Google predicts that the user might have searched for something related to the answer they were looking for.
They’re: these snippets show up when Google predicts that the user might be looking for a definition or explanation of a word or phrase.
Standard format: these snippets show up when Google can’t predict what the user is looking for, but it has enough information about the query to provide an answer in a standard format.
In the UK, a featured snippet is often shown as an answer to a query when other sites report that Google has problems understanding the original query, for example if someone searches for “Is obesity more dangerous than smoking?” and the answer is shown as “yes”. The feature is available in all languages of Google.
How To Add Snippets To Your Website or Post?
There are three ways to add a snippet to your website or post:
1) Add an extra piece of information in your page title and URL
2) Add a meta description
3) Add structured data markup
Adding Snippets with Google’s Structured Data Markup Helper
Open Link Google’s Structured Data Markup Helper
a. Choose the type of data that you want to markup
b. Paste the URL of the page you plan to markup
c. Highlight and select the elements that you want to mark up
d. Continue highlighting the other items on your page to add them to the markup list
e. Create the HTML
f. Insert the generated schema markup into your web page
Adding Snippets with WordPress Plugins
Schema markup can be easily added to WordPress with a plugin such as the All In One Schema.org Rich Snippets plugin. This plugin is one of the best for the job and provides a number of pre-loaded schema types to make it easy for you to plug in and activate schema.
Once activated, head over to your Dashboard and activate the plugin. Head to the Rich Snippets tab and configure your markup settings. Once configured, click the Save Configuration button to save the settings. Informative Titles of your website posts and pages should make it clear what your written content is about without being too specific to be spammy.
Key Take Away
Google has a lot of information about your site and it will use that information to determine what your page should rank for. This section covers the basics of how Google determines what a page should rank for. It also covers the importance of having a rich snippet and featured snippet on your site.
The following are some of the things that Google looks for on a page:
The title, meta description, and content (including images) all eventually make up the main snippet that people see when someone searches Google. For example, if someone searches for the keyword ” best SEO strategist Philippines“, Google will show the results based on these combined elements.
Google assigns the snippet on your page a value. The higher your snippet value, the higher your page is ranked!
