Today, Google added another feature in search result pages Recipe snippets. That means, the next time you search for a food recipe on Google, chances are you will end up seeing a thumbnail of the dish along with some more information such as preparation time, user reviews etc.

For example: A simple search on   thai mango salad, shows the following results

In the above snippet, there are 3 things to take note of. First, you can see the user reviews and ratings directly from the search result page. This helps to know whether other users have found the recipe useful or not. Secondly, you can know how much time is required to prepare the dish by looking at the   Total cook timedata. Finally, you can see a small thumbnail of the dish in the search result page.

The Recipe snippetsis the fifth type of snippet introduced in Google search results, the earlier types being reviews, people, video and events respectively.

How to Optimize your Site For Recipe Snippets

If you write about food recipes and want to optimize your blog for Recipe snippets, here are a few things you should know:

1. Always include the necessary micro data in your blog posts. This includes author information, preparation time, summary, review, cooking time etc. For a complete list of micro data and RDF’s, check this Recipe snippets help page.

2. Follow the correct format for organizing your recipe’s micro data. Do not lay all the information scattered but try to nest them properly. Here is a small example template that Google provides:

Google will add the recipe snippets gradually in the search results and there is no guarantee when your pages show up as recipe snippets in search results. You can always check and test your pages using the rich snippets testing tool.   [via Google Webmaster Central ]