By now you've seen search results with enhancements like pictures, reviews, prices, show times, phone numbers, addresses and even recipes included in specific listings. These extras (aka rich snippets) are as eye catching as a well done billboard on a busy stretch of road.

The great news is that getting those extras for your sites doesn't come with a monthly advertising bill and after you've read this article you'll be well on your way to leveraging rich snippets to get that step above your competition.

The first thing you need to know in understanding rich snippets is the terminology so that you and I are on the same page. What are Rich Snippets, Microdata and Microformats/RDFa?

• Rich Snippets is the name that the major search engines gave the additional information (pictures, reviews, prices, show times, phone numbers, etc.) that can be included in a site's search result listing.
  
  
• Microdata, Microformats or RDFa is what the actual HTML structured data is called that the search engines crawl and index to create the rich snippets within the search results.

Now, let's take a loo...