Two new Google web tools to improve your vacation rental marketing results
Rich Snippets
Google’s latest experiment, Rich Snippets, captures a web page’s structured data and displays it as snippets within the Google search results listing. Using microformats and RDFa open standards, webmasters can mark up Google-provided templates to aggregate their page’s own structured data. Currently Google is only capturing data on People and Reviews, and not all who annotate their HTML will immediately see results as Google gradually rolls out new features.
Why use it?
Vacation rental listings often feature Reviews and Testimonials right on the listing page. A vacation rental portal then adds the appropriate open standard mark ups to each of their customer’s pages to aggregate Reviews. Eventually, the rental listing would be returned in Google results with the average customer rating displayed as a snippet just below the web page name. See the example in the gallery below of a restaurant review page whose ratings are being captured in Google search results.
Google Squared
Another experimental tool, Google Squared, is essentially a visual fact collector and sorter based on attributes and key words selected by the user. Enter keywords and up pops your “Square” with page results going down and each page’s general attributes going across. Users may customize their Square by adding pre-set or custom column headings, adjusting column sizes, and by deleting certain listings or attributes of the Square.
Why use it?
Say you want to build a list of restaurants near your vacation rental. You could go to Google.com and sift through each site for reviews and menus and addresses or… you could go to Google Squared. Type in the keywords [ Boston restaurants ] (or the applicable region) and click “Square It”. Quite a few results will come up with handy attributes with which to base your decision on. Say you only want to list restaurants located on the waterfront. Scroll down the “Neighborhoods” column and delete rows by clicking the button to the left of the “Item name” column. You can add your own items by scrolling to the bottom of the page, typing into the “Add Items” text box and then click “Add”. Delete attribute columns by clicking to the left of the column titles, or add your own. For example, type [ Price ] into the “Add column” text box and click “Add”. Google Squared will search each item for that attribute and update the column if applicable. Don’t forget to doublecheck the information before publishing. See the gallery below for my Boston restaurants square with mark ups.
Google Squared Example
Since these tools are still in their experimental stages expect some limited functionality and hiccups. Most importantly, experiment yourself with features and Google help files to see how some of the web’s newest tools will help increase the return on your marketing efforts.
More on Rich Snippets
More on Google Squared
Posted by
Shannon Russo
on Nov 23rd, 2009 and filed under
Tools and Software.
You can follow any responses to this entry through the
RSS 2.0.
You can leave a response by filling following comment form or trackback to this entry from your site
