Many health and wellness web sites are always looking for ways to improve their Alexa ranking, Google ranking, social media skills, and SEO. The Tech Tools section of this web site will have basic tips from experts and non-experts alike who will share their successes with the audience of this blog. Hopefully, they will help anyone who has their own web site improve the sites popularity.

If you have a tip, use the contact link above to send it along.

Rich snippets are extra pieces of information that show up in Google listings. As an example, Google shows information such as reviews, product prices and recipe information in rich snippets. Google’s own studies have shown that adding rich snippets to your organic search listing can improve your click through rate from organic search.

Fortunately, they’re also free! A complete list of rich snippets can be found by clicking here.

For health and fitness sites, one of the rich snippet types that can be very helpful is the recipes rich snippet. This rich snippet displays a photo of the recipe along with other information such as cooking time, calories, and reviews:

While rich snippets won’t necessarily help your site rank higher today, they will help improve clicks to your site, helping to give your site a competitive click advantage in the rankings.

Rich snippets are fairly easy to implement. They rely on “semantic markup” to appear. Semantic markup is additional tagging a webmaster places on content, similar to HTML tags, to help search engines identify specific types of content. For examples on how to mark up recipes, click here. You can test your work to see if rich snippets will appear for your page using Google’s Rich Snippet Testing Tool, located at: http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/richsnippets.

To learn more about the various types of rich snippets and how to implement them, click here:

– Janet Driscoll Miller, President and CEO, Search Mojo