Snippet
What are snippets?
In the context of web search engines, snippets are those small text fragments we get when we run a search, showing a block of text made up of three elements:
The URL of the web page that matches the search The title of the page/result, in blue and in a larger font The description or summary, which gives an overview of what we’ll find when we visit the website.
There are also enriched snippets, or rich snippets, which offer more attractive and visual content, and which we’ll look at later.
1. Parts of a snippet
A snippet has the following elements, information the search engine takes from the HTML of the web page shown in the result:
- URL or website address. It shows the address or URL that will open when we click the page title or the web address itself.
- Page title. It is taken from the
<title>tag and is used to create the result’s title. For example:<title>Mailrelay -Email marketing y campañas efectivas</title>
It should be between 40 and 60 characters long and include the keyword you want to rank for. By clicking on the title, the visitor will access the corresponding URL or page.
- Description or summary of the page. It displays a preview text that gives the user a short description of what they’ll see when they visit the page. Its value is taken from the meta
<description>tag, for example:<meta name="Description" content=“En esta página tienes trucos y consejos para tu marketing digital!">
It should be between 130 and 155 characters long and include the keyword or its synonyms, which will appear in bold when they match the user’s search. It is the most important part of the snippet and is worth working on, as it is vital to increasing your chances of getting visits.
If we don’t fill in the meta <description> tag, Google uses the first 150 or 160 characters of the web page to complete it.
2. Rich snippets
In addition to conventional snippets, there are other types called rich snippets.
Rich snippets contain multimedia elements that make them more attractive, catch the visitor’s attention more easily and therefore achieve a higher CTR than conventional ones.
Snippet results are generated through the use of title and description meta tags, while rich snippets are generated through structured data markup on the web page.
Some of the data Google uses to create rich snippets includes: articles, books, courses, reviews, authors, products, organizations, recipes, events, podcasts, music, etc.