Summary:
This used to be a great suite of plugins, but it has being abandoned by the developer and has many serious bugs and performance issues.
The Author Hreview plugin pack makes it easy to upgrade your site, increasing search traffic with eye catching search engine results.
The plugin pack contains 3 plugins which each do something different-
- Author Hreview: A simple review plugin and is actually the plugin I have used since the launch of the blog to power the review boxes you sometimes see.
- WordPress Reviews: This is an advanced review plugin that transforms WordPress into a fully featured review site including user reviews, ratings & custom fields!
- Customer Testimonials: Makes it easy for you to collect and display user testimonials anywhere on your site.
So whether you want to add simple review boxes to your blog or transform it into a fully fledged reviews site these plugins are perfect!
They also include a bunch of widgets (you can see one in my sidebar) to display your latest/most popular/related reviews and so on.
Rich Snippet Markup
Each of these plugins also includes support for the review rich snippet markup. This is the magic stuff that allows you to dispay review ratings and stars directly in the search results like this-
Author Hreview Review
I’ve been using the Author Hreview wordpress plugin since the blog launched 12 months ago.
It takes minutes to setup and will instantly make your site more visible in the SERPS while increasing the click through rate of affiliate links.
Anyway check out my more detailed video tutorial & review-
Resources In The Video
Author Hreview – Add reviews, user reviews, review rich snippets & testimonials to your WordPress blog!
Don’t Like Videos? Follow This Instead!
Today we’re going to talk about how including review sections to your articles will improve your site’s visibility in the search engine results.
Doing this also gives you the option to show reader testimonials and make WordPress your own review platform.
What I Use
The three plugins that come with AuthorHreview which I use are:
- AuthorHReview
- WordPress Reviews
- Customer Testimonials
AuthorHReview is the original plugin that adds the review boxes, WordPress Reviews lets readers submit their own review and Customer Testimonials allows the user to gather testimonials and put them any place on your website to your liking.
Author H Review
This plugin adds a box to your post and it has a some options like adding a date, a name and other things. There is also a widget you can place on your blog with or without an image.
One great thing about this plugin is that you can add it to any article on your website in just a few clicks. You can preview the rich snippet before without the rating and after with the rating. If you’ve set up your Google authorship, the search result will also have your picture.
To set up Author h Review, it has their own menu set up in the WordPress menu. You can hide certain features or add others but your rich snippet will still show the star rating in the search results.
Other options to customize the plugin are the size and alignment of the review box, the style, button color and other details so there is a lot you can do with it to make it fit with your blog!
Adding Author HReview to a post
Let’s actually add a post using the plugin. So add a new post and come down to the review box below the body text.
What you can include:
- Star rating
- Name of the item you are reviewing
- Short review summary
- Disclaimer
- Price
- Version and type of product
- Author name
There are three different templates you can choose from, I normally use the default template. There is the option to hide the ratings box on each page, manually place the box by using the shortcode, upload an image, change the text for the button and alignment and establish if the link is follow or not.
So as you can see there are lots of customization options for this plugin. Personally, I like having the box up at the top so it’s easy to see.
Now that’s all set up, let’s see what the published post looks like!
The widget automatically updates itself to add the new review and you can check to see what the rich snippet looks like.
So that is the Author HReview plugin. Now let’s look at WordPress Review for a more advanced review plugin.
WordPress Reviews
WordPress Reviews is a more advanced plugin than the Author HReview, with more features like user reviews and comments.
Readers can send in their own personal reviews of the product and it’ll get added to the comments section.
Another cool thing it lets you do is add the pros and cons of the item and the rich snippet includes all the reviews, including your own and other people’s.
There’s more customization options for website placement or you can drop in the shortcode anywhere.
You can set the reviews with or without a summary or list reviews by tags which is nice if you have more than one product that gives the same service, you can just tag them and people can find it through that.
To set up the plugin, once again it has its own menu and you can just go in there and fill it out to your liking. You can even take out the user reviews if you don’t want that.
To protect your site from spammers, there are a couple options that are easy to set up. You can also hide the rating box and other details like the Author HReview plugin.
Using WP Reviews in a post
Like before, scroll down to the Review settings box and add in the details like name, rating, and summary. Make sure to tick the box that says Enable User Snippets.
If you want, you can fill in the pros and cons. Choose your display settings, add an image and the link. Remember you can always manually insert the review box into individual posts or put it on the top or bottom of the page.
Let’s see what the fully finished WP Review looks like!
Now you can see the text for the price doesn’t fit quite right so just go back in and fix that.
If you want to use just the shortcode, there are two different types that you can use.
The first shortcode says that you want your reviews pulled in chronological order with the images and summaries. The second one is just for five different related reviews. To include images, type “images=yes” or summaries with “summary=yes.”
If you want to show only the most recent reviews, type “recent_review num=1” and add summary or images if you want.
Let’s see how the shortcodes look.
As you can see, the reviews are displayed how I wanted either with summaries or images or without. With the shortcode you can paste it anywhere on your blog: the sidebar menu, beginning or end of posts.
That way people can easily see it and click on it!
In the event that you need more advanced fields for reviewing, you may try Meta Box plugin.
It is an individual WordPress plugin from this package but provides you with a powerful ability to create any kind of fields easily, which may give you more options and ideas.
Customer Testimonials
The last plugin we’re going to go over is the customer testimonials which is pretty handy for collecting different testimonials and putting them together.
There are some neat widgets for displaying the testimonials around your site but the coolest part would have to be the actual submission of them.
There’s a shortcode that creates a form for people to fill out and submit for approval.
You can also include the reviews into your rich snippets so that people can see it when it comes up in the search results. Pretty neat!
Now let’s learn how to set it up.
On your dashboard, click on Testimonials in the menu and it’ll take you to all of the testimonials so far with the details such as summary, date, website, etc. I like that it takes the gravatar from the email address so their picture comes up.
If you have some previous testimonials stored away in another place, you can add those and even set up categories for different services.
Under Settings there are more options such as home and front page snippets and SEO.
Displaying the Testimonials
Click Edit Page and you’ll see the testimonials written in code in the box.
You can see that it’s set up to have 3 different views: simple, tooltip and bubble which you can change to whatever you like. To change how many reviews are shown you can just type “num=1” or to however many.
To create the page with the submission form, just create a new page and name it something like Testimonials and paste in the shortcode.
This plug is really a handy tool to have so you can ask people to write a testimonial for you after they’ve subscribed to your mailing list or bought the item you reviewed.
There’s different ways to format it so since I really like this plugin, I’m going to add it to my main blog.
Resources In The Tutorial
Author Hreview – Add reviews, user reviews, review rich snippets & testimonials to your WordPress blog!
Wrapping It Ip
The plugin pack is really nice and you get all three of them so you have plenty of options for displaying reviews and including them in the rich snippets.
You can just do product reviews, turn your WP into a more advanced review platform or gather customer testimonials.
It’s a great way to show yourself off!