Google’s HighLighter Tool A Game Changer
Early this December, 2012; Google made waves in the internet marketing world by introducing their newest webmaster tool, data highlighter. The Google Data Highlighter Tool will remind you of a simple website building interface such as Wix and can be referred to as a WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) platform in terms of its simplicity.
The highlighter tool will be used for webmasters to literally “highlight” content on a website in order to mark it as structured data for Google to index in search results. Think Google should know that your local business is hosting an event next month? Then use this tool to highlight this event on your website and Google will show this “extra information” in search results. (Here’s what’s going on in San Diego this week. Search term: San Diego events)
“Extra information” that you want displayed in search results next to your website listing is known as rich snippets. And in the past in order to have any rich snippets displayed from your website would require the editing of HTML code on numerous pages of your website. (Nobody wants to edit HTML code) But now with the Google highlighter tool you no longer need to edit any code what so ever. Instead you just click, highlight, and tag content on your website and Google does the rest.
Check out this tutorial video of the Google highlighter tool to see what we’re talking about.
As the video explains not only is the highlighter tool super easy to use but Google believes that if you highlight 5-10 pages of your website accurately and have similar content structuring on other pages of your website, that the highlighter tool will be able to automatically index the rest of your website for other “rich snippets”. So if you have many calendar events on different pages of your site then you only have to highlight a few before Google finishes highlighting the rest automatically. Unbelievable right?
Now for all you old school rich snippet experts who have been practicing the art form for many a day and would like to break out your digital highlighter this instant and start marking up product pages, authors, events, music, people, and places all over your website in some sort of frenzy….. let it be known that currently the Google highlighter tool is only available in English and can only help webmasters highlight relevant calendar events. So you’ll have to take a deep breathe and wait patiently for Google to roll out this feature to all rich snippet categories. But you better believe the game is on once Google does. Race you to it?
For now highlighting calender events on your website is a good place for anyone and everyone to start in order to understand the tool better: http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/richsnippets
SEO Takaway: The Google highlighter tool really suggests to webmasters the need for consistency throughout website design. The simplicity of this tool should stress the creation of “rich snippet” content such as events, individual product pages, places, authors, and such.
First time you heard about this tool? Respect your elders then and share this amazing content by using a social button below! What goes around, goes around.