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Implementing rich snippets on your WebSphere Commerce site to improve search engine results

A step-by-step tutorial using WebSphere Commerce V7 FEP3

Naomi Wan (nylwan@ca.ibm.com), Staff Software Developer, IBM

Naomi Wan is a Staff Software Developer at the IBM Toronto Software Lab, Canada. She has been part of the WebSphere Commerce team since 2001. She has extensive experience in WebSphere Commerce starter stores and Web 2.0 technologies.

Summary: Learn how to mark up data for product reviews and other product information for the Madisons starter store that comes with WebSphere® Commerce V7.

Date: 24 Aug 2011
Level: Intermediate
PDF: A4 and Letter (780 KB | 14 pages)Get Adobe® Reader®

Activity: 14173 views
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Before you start

Search engine helps users find the page they want by showing a summary of content from web pages. These are called search result snippets. The more information a search result snippet can provide, the easier users will find the page they want. Using rich snippets, webmasters can further label content of their site to help users understand the content a page provides.

For example, the rating of a restaurant can be summarized as shown in Figure 1.

Figure 1. Search result snippet of a restaurant
Search result of a restaurant with rich snippets

Note the search result snippet in Figure 1 displays the summary of rating of a restaurant, along with the total number of reviews available for the restaurant.

About this tutorial

This tutorial will provide examples on how to mark up data for product reviews and other product information for the Madisons starter store that comes with WebSphere Commerce.

There are various mark up formats available to mark up HTML for rich snippets, for example, microdata, microformats, and PDFa. In addition to these formats, schema.org provides a collection of schemas that are recognized by all major search providers like Google®, Yahoo!®, Microsoft®, and Bing®. Microdata is the standard format used by schema.org.

In this tutorial, examples will be provided in microdata format and using the schema.org vocabulary.

Objectives

In this tutorial, you will learn how to:

Identify what product data can be marked up.
Locate the places to mark up product information in the Madisons store's JSPs.
Test your rich snippets using the Rich Snippet Testing Tool from Google.

Prerequisites

You need to be familiar with the following:

System requirements

Examples provided from this article are applied to stores that come from WebSphere Commerce V7 with Feature Pack 3, which contains a new implementation for Search Engine Optimization (SEO). We highly recommend that you leverage Feature Pack 3 for the SEO solution. For more information, see this WebSphere Commerce Information Center topic, Search engine optimization (SEO) for Version 7 Feature Pack 3 or later.

In addition, a Social Commerce feature needs to be enabled for product review function. For instructions on how to enable the Social Commerce feature, see Enabling and configuring Social Commerce.

Duration

This tutorial takes about 1 hour to complete.

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