It was probably back in January when I did a guest post reviewing one of my favorite RC toys, the webmaster required me to register an account, upload and edit the article by myself, and it was there where I saw an interesting and useful tool for reviews.
I decided to ask to the owner of the site about it and he told me that the name of the plugin was “Author hReview” and that it was very helpful for writing, rating, and summarizing reviews. I was impressed by how easy was to use it when I uploaded my guest article so I decided to give it a try, and I have to say that this free plugin resulted in one of the most powerful tools that I use on my site. As it is pretty effective for me I decided to write this post with the intention of helping other bloggers to learn more about this plugin and get great results.
One of the things that I like the most about the Author hReview plugin is that it automatically incorporates the schema.org code to my posts; this means that the plugin creates rich snippets that are great to increase the click through rate in the Google search results. Just in case that you don’t know, a snippet is what Google displays in the search results pages, but a rich snippet has other useful information, such as the name, photo, and rating of the author of the post, and more. Rich snippets help to make more attractive the way a search result is displayed and this is why it increases the CTR.
This plugin has in fact a pro version, and even when the free version does the job very good, the paid version is a great way to go since it adds more details to the post and the article looks even better. I personally use the free version and it works fantastic, the truth is that I am seriously considering upgrading to the paid version because I’ve seen posts using it and they look very good.
How to use the Author hReview WordPress plugin?
Now let’s get into more detail about the plugin.
Both the setup and installation processes are very straight forward, simply download the plugin and activate it; a tab called Author hReview will appear at the left side of the dashboard where the configuration can be done. The plugin is designed to be very user-friendly and the setup will take you less than a minute; simply select how to display the rating box on the post, the size and alignment of the box, and the color of a button and that’s it.
Now that the setup is done, the next work is to create a post and fill the details in the rating box, this box will appear inside the edit post section of each of your posts, and there you’ll be able to add very useful information, such as the rating stars, author name, date, price of the item, type of post, and more. After adding the information (fill in the blanks as you wish, they are not mandatory) simply add a summary of the article and the rating box will be ready. I recommend you to experiment a little with this until you are happy with the results, and in order for you to get a better taste of what the plugin looks like and how to configure it I’m including a useful video here.
Why should I use something like the Author hReview plugin?
Right now I can think in two major reasons for using this product:
- Rich Snippets are a great way to increase the number of clicks your site receives when Google shows it on the search results, this has a direct impact in your traffic and even when the site is not in the number 1 position it stands out easily, so if you are in position number 4 and the number 1 is not using rich snippets chances are that you will attract some of the clicks just because of this tool.
- The rating box that appears on the live post is great, I personally find it very well designed and easy to create, I use tools such as click-tale to see what a visitor actually does on my pages and I’ve seen that this box takes a lot of their attention and usually they click on the link there.
If you are thinking that this could be for you I definitely encourage you to try it, start with the free version and from there and if you like it upgrade to the paid service. It is good to know that if you decide to use the Author hReview WordPress plugin and add a rating box to an already indexed post, the rich snippet won’t appear right after the post is updated; give Google a while to integrate the rich snippet to the search results, in posts that are already indexed I have waited up to a week in order to see the stars appearing, and in brand new posts where the rating box is created at the same time than the article, rich snippets appear at the same time they are indexed.
To your Online Success!
About the author:
Jose Lozano is a passionate blogger who enjoys writing reviews about RC flying toys at his site RC Hobbies on Air; there he likes to share interesting posts about RC helicopter flight control and tips and tricks for hobbyists like him.
Jose has found the Author hReview plugin very useful to rate the products that he reviews as well as to create posts with a very professional look.
