This post is a video that follows on from the last post, VIDEO: 90 Seconds to Perfect Microdata: Rich Snippets Tutorial for Local SEO so if you haven’t already watched that one it would be a good idea to do so before going further ;-D

This video is another tutorial anyone can use to check that their microdata rich snippets are set up correctly. It is extremely simple to do but also an extremely important step to take in order to ensure that the search engines will correctly interpret your microdata code so that you get the full benefit. If you don’t validate, you’re wasting your time mate! (Sorry for the terrible rhyming – poetry is definitely not my thing.)

BEWARE (2013-04-17): I recently noticed that when sharing our blog posts to my Google+ profile, pages from some sites using microdate code cause an issue with the title Google+ displays for the page snippet. I discovered this is caused by the itemprop=”name” element of the microdata code. I’ll write a quick blog post on this when I get the chance. Basically what I did was remove the itemprop=”name” element for our business name and that solved it. Please comment if this helped you!

TRANSCRIPT of Validate Microdata Code & Check Google+ Rich Snippets: Local SEO Tutorial:

Hi, it’s Adam Zahler from A to Z Net Ventures and today I want to tell you some more about microdata. In our last video I showed you how we can easily create your microdata code with your name address and phone number (NAP) and add it to your website.

Today I’m going to continue on that theme by showing you how you can easily verify the code that you created – just to make sure that it’s all present and correct and that the search engines are properly able to recognize it.

So, I’m on our own company website page, and if I just scroll down to where I’ve go the address (here it is); that’s using microdata that I created using the free tool I showed you in the last video.

Now, go to Google’s testing tool which you can find here at http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/richsnippets. We can easily add in the website URL that we want to test. There we go. Click on ‘PREVIEW’, and here it shows you what it understands from the various bits of microdata on your page.

Today we are not concerned with this ‘author’ information or ‘publisher’ information. Today we are just going to concentrate on the ‘name’, ‘business’, ‘phone number’, and ‘address’. So down here we have and item that shows you the format as a ‘local business’ with a business name ‘A to Z Net Ventures LLC’. It’s got an address which is ‘Item 1′ which refers to this box here (last box on the page) and you can see it is referred to as a ‘postal address’. Then we’ve go the street address, the city, the region and the postal code and we’ve go the phone number here.

NOTE: At the time of making this video, the ‘Organization’ page on the Schema-Creator.org site didn’t have phone number field so I added it manually (which I strongly recommend doing). Below is the code for you to copy and paste (replacing with your own business phone number of course). You can paste this line of code after the postalCode element in your generated microdata:

<span itemprop="telephone">(123) 456-7890</span><br>

So from this we can clearly see that Google and other search engines are going to easily recognize our microdata code and that everything is correct.

Now, you might also want to verify a little bit further, I say ‘verify’ or check it, and that you can do by visiting your own Google Places page; now it’s called Google+ Local. And here on our company Google+ Local page you can see that it has our address written here [immediately below the company name] and also over here [in the 'About' information].

SIDE NOTE: The more observant of you reading this may have noticed that the company name Google used on our Google+ Local business page is not exactly right and also the phone number is not up to date. Unfortunately these kind of issues seem to be common when managing your listing and we are trying to rectify this but it can take time. Hopefully by the time you read this the company name and phone number will have been corrected.

If we simply do a right-click and a ‘View page source’ and if you hit Ctrl+f (if you are on a PC) to use the find function and then search for ‘schema’. The first one [highlighted] doesn’t apply so we need to find the next and this looks like it. You can see the Schema / microdata mark-up  you can see the ‘/PostalAddress’, there’s the ‘streetAddress’,… ‘addressCountry’,… ‘addressRegion’,… ‘addressLocality’,… and so on. So you could actually find that code and then copy and paste that into your site and that will of course also verify here [Google's free tool linked above].

And so that’s it! An easy way, or two easy ways that you can check your Schema code is present and is correct and is easily read by the search engines.

If you didn’t watch the first video then I suggest you go watch that as well just to get some background information and also some help with creating the code in the first place.

Okay, thanks for watching. I’ve been Adam Zahler [I still am by the way] at A to Z Net Ventures. If you have any questions [please post in the comments below] or you are interested in our services, please don’t hesitate to visit our website, or you can email us or call us.

Thanks for watching and check out our other videos…

UPDATE: For a good explanation and introduction to rich snippets, take a look at the HubSport blog post http://blog.hubspot.com/how-to-use-google-rich-snippets

Don’t forget to post any questions below and I’ll get back to you.

The post VIDEO Tutorial: Easily Validate Microdata Code & Check Google+ Local for Better SEO appeared first on AtoZ Houston SEO.