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Snippet

What is a snippet?

Snippets, for web search engines, are those small text fragments that we see when we search for a keyword and that show us 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 with a larger body The description where a summary of what we will find when visiting the website.

There are also rich snippets, which offer more attractive and visual content, which we will see later.

1. Parts of a snippet

A snippet has the following elements, information that the search engine collects from the HTML of the web page itself that offers the result:

  • URL or website address. It shows the address or URL that will be accessed when we click on the title of the page or the website address.
  • Page title. It is generated from the tag <title> and is used for creating the result title. For instance: <title>Mailrelay - Email marketing y campañas efectivas</title>

It should have between 40 and 60 characters, as well as the keyword for which you want to rank. By clicking on the title, the visitor will access the corresponding URL or page.

  • Description or summary of the page. It is used to show a preview text; That is, you can show the user a brief description of what they will be able to see when visiting the page. The data is taken from the tag meta <description>, for instance: <meta name="Description" content=“En esta página tienes trucos y consejos para tu marketing digital!">

It must have between 130 and 155 characters, as well as the keyword or its synonyms, which will be displayed in bold when matching a search result. It is the most important part of the snippet and must be worked on as it is vital to increase the chances of attracting visitors.

If you don’t use the meta tag <description>, Google will use 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 of snippets called: rich snippets.

Rich snippets contain multimedia elements that make them more attractive, make it easier to attract the visitor’s attention 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 that Google uses to create rich snippets are: article, book, course, opinions, authors, products, organizations, recipes, events, podcasts, music, etc.