Do you want Google to show your website in the search results in the most attractive way? Then the Google Data Highlighter tool may be just the thing for you to use. It allows you to pull out important aspects of your web pages and get them shown in the search results.

An example would be that you are organising a series of seminars around the country to showcase your services. On your website is the venue and dates plus what your seminars are about. You can use the data highlight function to get this information shown in the search results as rich snippets, some examples of which are here

Google Data Highlighter: Data types that are supported

You can use Data Highlighter to teach Google about the following types of data on your site:

• Articles
• Events
• Local Businesses
• Restaurants
• Products
• Software Applications
• Movies
• TV Episodes
• Books

The following text is taken directly from Google Support

“To tell Data Highlighter which of the pages on your site contain data, you create one or more page sets. A page set is a collection of pages on a site that display data consistently (possibly generated from the same template) and are organized so that URLs follow a simple pattern. Data Highlighter will only teach Google about pages that are in a page set.

Data Highlighter doesn’t teach Google about pages that already contain HTML markup specifying the data structure. You can still use Data Highlighter if some of the pages on a site already contain HTML markup, but Data Highlighter will teach Google only about the pages without the markup.

If your site organizes data in different ways (such as using different templates for music and speaking events), you can create a page set for each organization.

For example, consider a site that contains information about music and speaking events in the following pages:

www.example.com/events/music/pop/pop-music.html

www.example.com/events/music/classical/classical-music.html

www.example.com/events-speaking/europe/europe-reviews.html

www.example.com/events-speaking/asia/asia-reviews.html

Pages one and two could be in one page set because they both describe music events and their URLs follow a simple pattern: www.example.com/events/music/*/* (where each * is a wildcard for a single URL component).

Likewise, pages three and four could be in another page set because they both describe speaking events and their URLs follow a simple pattern: www.example.com/events-speaking/*/*

Detecting changes in a page set

Each time Google crawls pages on your site, Data Highlighter extracts data and makes the data available for rich snippets. If you make significant changes to the way your pages display information or to the site’s URLs, you should delete the original page sets and teach Data Highlighter about the new structure of your site.”

This is where you find data highlighter in the webmaster tools menu

Google do have a very good video explaining all and here it is for you –

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