No Technical Method To Gain Featured Snippet
On Twitter, John said this,
"There's no technical way to achieve that, so it seems somewhat futile as the primary goal. I would recommend focusing more on what's helpful for the site/business."
There is no specific guide or technical method to gain featured snippet position. There may be ways for SEOs to push Google to have their site appear in the featured snippet. It all comes down to the content structure and written content. There is usually only one featured snippet position, but it is not always. It cannot be easy to rank for these spots.
John says that there is no meta tag or other way to tell Google that this piece of content is a featured search snippet, and Google does provide documents about featured snippets and how to not show up in featured snippets.
These are the tweets:
It can be helpful to mark up content entities with structured information. Google can easily identify the content by using this practice, and Google can find relevant content faster for featured snippets.
Clear Structure – Good Writing Begin with Clear Writing
The Elements of Style by William Strunk, Jr., and E. B. White is a useful resource for expressing ideas clearly. If you're interested in clear content structure, we recommend you this book. This book teaches you how to structure an essay or article to communicate the subject matter better. It is important to outline and plan the content. It should have a start that explains the topic and a middle that explains the details. The final paragraph should reiterate the main topic.
Hierarchical Structure to Featured Snippet Rating
To better communicate the topic's content, you can use heading elements in HTML. Hierarchical refers to listing ideas in order of importance.
If something is a major topic, you can give it an H2 heading element. You can list a subtopic under that H2 heading element with an H3 element, and this will make it clear to search engines that the content labeled H3 is part of a group covered by the H2 element.
John Mueller suggested the use of tables:
"We recognize tables on pages to get it out more easily."
As John Mueller said, tables are a great way of organizing content and giving it structure.
Then he warned about the dangers of using fake tables:
"Whereas if you use fancy HTML and CSS to make it look like a table, but it's not a table, that's a lot harder for us."
Named Anchors Can Help With Featured Snippets
A named anchor creates a link from one section of a web page to another section of the web page. Most content creators use this in the table of contents. Here, a user can click from the table of contents to a section of a web page located lower down.
John Mueller replied that they could be useful because they may appear on search results pages (SERPs). He said that featured snippets would not work.
This information is extremely useful. Many studies have shown that featured snippets rank higher when organized using ordered lists instead of unorganized ones, and John Mueller's explanation sheds light on this. This content is highly organized and it can rank well in featured snippets.
Our experience and opinion are that the ordered or unordered list doesn't rank because it's ordered/unordered. They rank because the ideas in the content are coherent, well-organized, and well-structured.
Many pages that don't have ordered/unordered list rank in featured snippets
The important thing is not the orderly/unordered content. John Mueller said that the point was to create a website with a clear structure.
Without a clear outline, content can be unclear and lacking structure. Our experience shows that successful content ranks well when organized and planned ahead of time with clear structure.
