See this cool box on the right? With cute yellow stars? That is one of my favorite plugins at the moment and I am going to tell you why you should have it too.
It is free. Persuaded already?
It is developed by Hesham Zebida, the guy behind FamousBloggers.net and Thesis Awesome Skins, so you know it is something good.
This was originally a Thesis theme only plugin, but I think I managed to trick Hesham into coding it to work with any theme. So now, you can use it with any WordPress theme.
What does Author hReview plugin do?
It adds the review data into your posts to be picked up by search engines.
There are a few options you can use, check the screenshot below:
As you can see, I am using the standard box and I set the width to 250 pixels. You can switch to “mini rating box” instead.
The first two options are self explanatory, you can display stars on your home page and display an additional box at the bottom of the post.
I like that you have 8 colors to chose from for the button that says More Details, so it will be easy to match it with any design.
Money making advantage
When Google picks up on the info you entered into the plugin fields in the post edit window, it will display this in the search results:
If I am seeing 10 results on the page and one of them has stars, I am more likely to click on the one with stars. No matter how many of them there are. So you can see the traffic potential here…
On the other hand, let’s say you have a blog about dog crates and you are an affiliate for the biggest manufacturer. You and hundreds of others.
If you do reviews and add the plugin to the mix, your reviews will be displayed as product reviews (see the image above), which affects customers when they are searching for info. They are more likely to click the review with the stars (I asked a lot of “dog people” friends, before writing the post).
Using this plugin gives you a chance to stand out in the crowd of dog crate affiliates (or any other crowd) = more money made.
This works for any niche, because there is always going to be something you are reviewing/promoting/recommending.
The sidebar widget
This is another cool addition. You will find it in your widgets section. It displays the last reviews in the sidebar, which is another push to people to click on those reviews. It stands out just enough to entice people to click.
Conclusion
This plugin has had a long road from the first version, where it was Thesis only and worked on new posts only (now you can edit your old ones). When you know how much time and love someone put in a plugin, you know it will work like a charm for a long time.
I highly recommend to try it out and use the advantage you can get with it.
What do you think about it?
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Hi Brankica
Another great review and I definitely agree that it is more likely that a person will click a review with stars. Will be interesting to see how many of them then go check out the product.
Thanks for the review and letting us know about this plugin. Very generous of Hesham too to make this available for free
Patricia Perth Australia
I still think he is nuts, lol, he could have made a fortune on it
But all in all he really did a great job and I am happy he gave it away for free, it will be a great way for people to hear about his amazing work.
You are not the only one who think so, my wife say the same .. hehe
Hey Patricia,
I think you should give it a try as you actually review nice Lavender products, this could be a good addition to your blog.
I was thinking the same thing Hesham. When I do reviews it will be so handy. Thanks again for so generously sharing this with the blogging community
Patricia Perth Australia
You are welcome Patricia , enjoy your weekend.
Hi Brankica,
This plugin looks awesome. I had no idea that Google shows the stars of your rating, that’s brilliant and I completely agree that we would click on the search results with stars compared to the other results, and if most people are doing this, it will probably mean even higher ranking (I’m not that good with SEO, but I think that this makes sense).
Thanks a lot for sharing and helping to make it available for all themes and not just Thesis
I just hope not everyone will use it so I can make a fortune on selling some products, lol.
Oh, now I got it!
Hi Jens,
Implementing rich snippets is highly recommended by Google, it will help the search engine to get to know your content better, and easily determine where to place your content (review post in this case) in search results!
So, yeah.. this makes a lot of sense!
Another great plug in review. I do see some great potential for this. Specifically for a review type site I am contemplating.
The stars are also a huge benefit, like you pointed out. It is probably partially a subconcious thing… but I think it really helps to have that subtle little push to click the one link over the other. Probably worth a “spot” of two in rankings for “extra clicks”
A review type of site? What are you making now? I can’t catch up with you, man!
Hey Steve,
The plugin is ideal for a review type site, but pay attention here that it will handle author/editor reviews only, not involving customers in ratings like other plugins or themes dose!
I love this plugin Brankica and already been using the Thesis only version for a while. It works well and with the recent upgrade to “any theme”, I think it is just awesome. On a side note, I noticed (by looking at my in-page analytics), that those “shinny stars” in the sidebar actually convert very well
I was planning to do the same, check how they convert
I can’t wait, but have to give it a few days ! I am even thinking of moving the widget higher up the sidebar.
Looking forward to see the results of your test, this should be interesting! However, I think the sidebar widget will convert even if it show in a lower spot, the shiny stars should grab the attention!
Hey buddy, it’s really exciting to know that the sidebar widget convert well for you!
By the way, Brankica and You were the first who’ve tested the early version of the plugin, thanks to your awesome feedback and ideas, I was able to make it better!
Good Job
The stars do look great Brankica!
I think this plugin is wonderful, and since I have Thesis for my writing blog that am currently working on, this would be a great idea. And to know that Google shows the stars of your rating, makes it all the more lucrative!
Thanks so much for sharing about it
You could probably put it to great use to review some writing courses and guides, people would click on those stars for sure
Hey Harleena,
I hope you will enjoy the plugin, the cool thing is now it works with any theme, not only Thesis!
Looks spiffy Brankica. But I have too much going on there to add another box, plugin etc. I like the sSO advantages, but I gotta stick with the tools I’m currently using. My blog is getting saucer eyes because of all the surprises I’m springing upon him all the time.
Hey, we all know our priorities, right
Hi Ivin, I see you have a busy sidebar, but guess what? I think mine is more busy
P.S. You still can use the plugin, you don’t have to use the side bar widget.
Cheers!
Hello Brankica. I like this plugin a lot. The 5 stars adds an edge to the entire thing. At first , I thought it was all about people rating your posts, but for you to rate products could add some authority to your reviews. Some people might even say: ‘I’ve been reviewed my so-and-so’… That would be awesome.
I agree. I’ve been doing reviews for some time now and it is one of my favorite things so adding the shiny stars to them is just what I wanted
Hey Brian,
This plugin present the author/editor rating, so blog visitors and readers are not involved in the matrix! This makes the plugin very light weight!
P.S. thanks for today’s post on BE, I love it
This looks useful. Now, we can easily post review box in various aspects. It is also interesting to know that the plugin helps in SEO process. Thanks for your recommendations!
Hey Jane, would love to hear your thoughts about the plugin when you have a chance to try it!
Hey Hesham! I think the plugin is awesome. I’ve tried it for a few days now and the results are excellent! Great for SEO and CTR
Thanks Jane,
Glad to hear that!
Thanks for the review! I have wanted to add this to my website for a long time and this seems like a great solution. Especially since it is already optimized to appear in Search. With other plugins my worry was putting in the proper tags for it to show up in Google. I can code, but I would rather use that time for writing.
I will be trying this out soon.
Hi Susan,
Glad you like it!
I’ve seen some bloggers add snippets manually into their review posts, this is something I will never do!
So, I’ve decided to code this plugin because I see that people need an easy solution , so there absolutely no need for them to code when someone else have done it
Cheers!
Don’t forget to let us know how you like it after you check it out
Hey Brankica,
Your article and this plugin are full of WIN!
I really agree with every single point made about the psychology behind seeing the small stars appearing as a review on the search results.
Although I also did spot Hesham’s comment on Google’s recommendation about using rich snippets on our sites. (I definitely should research a bit more into this…)
Thanks for the review, take care and speak soon Pit!
Sergio
PS. Special thanks to Hesham as well for the fine release, that site looks tight!
Hi Brankica,
Nice review. Hesham is always at the top of his game! I’ve just been digging around in this microformat stuff and enabling some of it on some of my older posts using features from another plugin. So it’s doubly welcome that Hesham has coded up a plugin with a few checkboxes to make it simpler.
Thanks for sharing this with the community (both of you!).
hello branika,
Is there a way for customizing this plugin to have 10 stars, instead of five stars…
I am not sure since I don’t play with plugin codes but you should contact the developer and ask. Maybe it isn’t hard to set it up like that.
Hi, I’m sorry I know this will probably sound like a complete noob question but I can’t get the reviews to appear properly on site. I have installed the plugin, activated it and marked up my reviews (schema) but they just appear in text format on the site. (They are being picked up correctly by Google’s Rich Snippets testing tool.) Is there something that I’m overlooking?
So it doesn’t look like this nice box on my post? If that is the only problem, it may just be some CSS problem. You should ask Hesham though, he will know it way better, I am not that techie.
Hi Brankica, thanks for the prompt reply.
Nah it just appears as plain text. Yeah maybe it is a CSS issue…..that’s all a bit over my head as well to be honest. If anyone else has had the same problem I’d be pleased to hear how they sorted it out though. Thanks.
p.s. how can I ask Hesham directly?
Try this http://authorhreview.com/contact/
Thanks Brankica much appreciated.
Thanks for the plugin Hesham and thanks for the post Brankica.
Just set it up on my blog and added it to a review… of a Genesis theme as it turns out.
Thanks for the mention of the widget that you can use to link to previous reviews… is that mentioned over at wordpress.org?
If it is, I missed it.
BTW – love the Genesis site.