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Clik here to view.The following video is a very easy tutorial I put together recently (also available on our A to Z Net Ventures YouTube Channel) which walks you through the steps you can take to create your microdata code rich snippets that Google recommends for using as a local company. This video shows you how to handle the microdata use introduced in the previous blog post What are Rich Snippets / Microdata & How Are They Used for Local SEO on Your Website? (read this first for a little background info about rich snippets and their growing importance for SEO).

Please post any questions you have or help you require in the comments section at the end of this post. I’ve also included the video transcript below the YouTube video for any one that can’t view the video for whatever reason. Enjoy the tutorial and leave some feedback…

UPDATE: After watching this video tutorial, be sure to check out the next microdata rich snippets video tutorial in this series which shows you how to validate you code once it is installed on your site – this is an important step.

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 90 Seconds to Perfect Microdata: Rich Snippets Tutorial for Local SEO:

Hi, this is Adam Zahler of A to Z Net Ventures and I’m just creating this quick video to show you how you can add the all-important microdata or rich snippets to your website code. This code is important because it tells the search engines specific details about your website, your business, yourself or whetever else so that they can quickly grab details from your code and then index and highlight them in various ways that they might decide to do.

What you need to do is head on over to http://www.schema-creator.org and you’ll arrive at this page here (NOTE: their homepage). You’ll see a quick introduction with different ‘schemas’ you can choose here. Now I’m going to show you how we did our own company Schema code. We are a company so we would go for ‘Organization‘ (NOTE: a link in the left navigation on their homepage). When you get to that page you scroll down and here you can start entering in your details.

Now you first need to choose a type of organization. We are an SEO company and we are focused more on the local market so we are going to go with ‘Local Business‘. Then ‘Name‘ is obviously the name of your company, ours is A to Z Net Ventures, LLC. Use the full name of your company, the full registered name – that’s very important for local SEO purposes. Then your URL, for us it’s http://www.atoznetventures.com. ‘Description’ – we’re going to ignore that for the time being, Notice on the right it’s giving you a preview as you add the details and the code as well automatically updates as you go. So next we’re going to put in our address. ‘PO Box’ we don’t need so ‘City‘; well we’re in Houston. ‘State/Region‘; we’re in Texas. ‘Postal code’… ‘Country‘ is United States obviously but we are going to leave that for now (NOTE: we are only focusing on the US markets anyway so no need to specify a country). And there you have it!

EDIT: You may have noticed that I did not add a phone number. The current ‘Organization’ page on the Schema-Creator.org site does not have an option to enter a phone number but I recommend adding it in manually. Below is the code which you can copy and paste using your phone number (on a new line after the postalCode element in my example):

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

So on your right that shows you how it will look when you have pasted it into your website and here is the code you need to grab and paste directly into your website HTML editor. And that’s it! So just copy and paste and you are good to go!

In my next video I’m going to tell you how you can use the best code possible or correct code to match up with your Google Local account and also how you can verify that you have got that down accurately.

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: 90 Seconds to Perfect Microdata: Rich Snippets Tutorial for Local SEO appeared first on AtoZ Houston SEO.