Using WordPress Rich Snippets Plugin to Markup Your Reviews

I’ve been working with content markups for more than two years now, this started here on FamousBloggers, it was my first site to implement reviews markups, then the story goes. And, finally I am able to introduce a new premium WordPress plugin called WP Rich Snippets, which allow adding more specific types of schema markups to content.

In this post, I will walk you through the WP Rich Snippets plugin to show you what it dose.

Installing and setting up the plugin

One you install and activate the plugin on your website, you just have to visit the settings page and make a few decisions.

You probably need to see the general settings, and rating settings tabs, these two tabs has the most important settings that you need to make a decision about. Mostly, in the general tab; you need to select a currency and types of content you want to enable the plugin to work on. Then, under the rating tab; tell the plugin what you want to do, enable user reviews? Or keep it simple for only editorial reviews.

After you edit and save the settings page. You can go a head and markup your content, however I would like to tell you a little about how this plugin works.

How it works?

In your editor page, you will see a new custom post meta box.

In the Rich Snippets post meta box, select from the drop list a markup type you would like to use in your entry.

Each type has its own settings, the plugin makes it easy to add details to specific type of schema. The most important thing here is to fill the required fields, mostly those who show on the main tab. Other less important settings can be found in other tabs.

As you can see above; when I choose type “Product”, I see radio buttons to choose between Review types, which I named them as Rating, Percentage, Votes and Aggregate, this is what you get when you choose review type percentage:

So, once you fill the fields on the main tab, added a title and placed your main review in the content editor, you are ready to publish a better marked page. These markups tells Google more about your page, so Google will index it better.

After publishing the entry, you can always test it in Structured Data Test Tool, and see if rich snippets shows and the page is marked up correctly.

The Box (formally called, the Rating Box)

When you published a review post, the plugin will display a Box with review details, this Box is showing automatically by filtering main content of the page, and it includes all makeups for the page content.

Select rating, and fill product name and description:

This consider the minimal details that you can add to the Box, it should look something like this:

As you see above, the Box has a simple layout, a transparent background and it has no borders. Most of the schema markups are included to this Box, only a few markups wrapping what’s inside the content area and entry content.

Keep in mind that Google doesn’t like hidden content, you really want these details to show up to your website visitors.

Let’s add a few criteria fields:

Criteria fields is used to display more specific rating for both editor and users, but in this example I will only use the Editor ratings.

Save your post, then view it in your browser, you will get something like this:

The Box is easy to edit via a special filter, and you can hook other elements to it. You also can override its styles and do things like changing colors using CSS.

Add-ons: Can be used to extend the plugin functionality

With the help of add-ons, you can extend the functionality of the plugin rapidly. At this point, I’ve released three premium add-ons for the WP Rich Snippets plugin, which can be purchased individually or as part of another license. It’s not hard to even create your own add-on, I will be publishing some tutorials and update the documentation with examples of add-ons soon!

The WP Rich Snippets add-ons

• Table add-on
• Compare add-on
• Call to action add-on

Bottom Line

Markups becomes more important everyday. Websites with structured data are more likely to get indexed better -what I mean with better here is: more accurate rank- in Search engines like Google.

Markups is more easier to implement than ever, you don’t have to deal with code, it’s simple as making a few decisions and filling some setting fields.

Learn more about the WP Rich Snippets plugin.

And – By the way- If you like to know more about the business model I’ve followed and how I started this WordPress plugins business, then you can read my other post at wpleaders.com, I’ve published a detailed post about how I created a businesses with only one WordPress plugin, you may find it interesting.

Let me know if you have any questions about the new plugin!