Microdata, Rich Snippets and Authorship
The subject of Rich Snippets for Joomla is also an advanced topic. Rich Snippets are also called Microdata. They help to further structure your HTML by setting up subjects with properties. If you use them properly, you can get bonus points from Google, like having stars from readers reviews shown in the search results, or a small video-thumbnail, price from webshop products, etc., as in this example for a restaurant:
If you look at the source code of your page, you will see something like this:
<div itemprop="aggregateRating" itemscope="" itemtype="http://schema.org/AggregateRating">
<div class="rating">
<i class="star-img stars_3_half" title="3.5 star rating">
<img alt="3.5 star rating" class="offscreen" src="">
</i>
<meta itemprop="ratingValue" content="3.5">
</div>
</div>
You can see that properties are assigned to the tags, which helps search engines to understand the code. The syntax is standardized according to schema.org.
It might not immediately boost your rankings, but for your CTR (Click Through Rate) in the search engine rankings it will help. Research showed that users are 30% more likely to click on your result than a similar result without Rich Snippets.
Currently you need plugins and overrides to implement them. Joomla 3.2 introduced some support for microdata, but this is only a library for Joomla developers, so actual introduction in the content will have to wait a while.
There are quite a few plugins already for adding microdata, some quite generic, some quite specific. An example is Rich Snippets Vote, which adds the microdata format to the output of the voting system. Also a set of overrides can be applied through Microdata for Joomla.
Finally, nothing stops you from creating the correct HTML in your editor. For this purpose, we've got our favourite editor again, JCE, which has a nice add-on available for just this purpose: Micro-data add-on for JCE.
Google authorship
A special case is the picture shown in the search results:
This is a special case of using micro-data, it is a result of connecting your website with your Google+ page. If done correctly, your face will show up. To achieve this, first create an acount on Google+ and then follow the directions on the .
You can also achieve the effect by making sure you mention your website in your Google+ page as a site (custom link) you contributed to, followed by a link from your website (every page) to your Google+ profile as follows:
<a href="/[profile_url]?rel=author">Google+</a>
Replace [profile_url] with your Google+ profile's URL. In my case this would result in this:
<a href="https://plus.google.com/+SimonKloostra?rel=author">Google+</a>
You can check whether you have actually done so (both microdata and auhorship) in a correct way by using the test-tool in your Webmaster account: www.google.com/webmasters/tools/richsnippets.