What are Featured Snippets?
You may have noticed how in many question based searches Google now offers answers before requiring you to actually go to a website. This is what has been coined a "Featured Snippet" and really has nothing to do with any code you placed on a page but rather how Google is displaying an answer to a question based search in their search egine.
Here is an example of a Featured Snippet that came up when I search "How to bake an apple pie. There are not always steps listed for the questions as some answers can be given with a single answer such as definitions.
Why would you want a Featured Snippet to appear linking to your site?
Simply put traffic. There have already been tons of studies about the benefit of these snippets and many sites are seeing huge increases in traffic simply due to their ability to best answer a common question… or even an uncommon one. How relevant that traffic is can be a different issue entirely but I'd recommend to make the page that answers the question easy to navigate so that they can explore any other portions of our site that you might want to drive traffic to.
How can your answer appear as the Featured Snippet in a Google search?
As usual this is completely up to Google. They are as usual not entirely transparent on how this selection process works and even if they were it would be worth little to know since they change their algorithms so frequently now.
Regardless the bottom line on how to get there is pretty simple. Google wants to show the most relevant results to those searching and will continue to refine their algorithm as best hey can to provide that. In conclusion you want to answer the question the best you possible can – organized concise and correct.
