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by Roger Janik November 11, 2009

Roger Janik

Roger Janik is the President and Founder of ServerSideDesign.com – The Web Marketers. ServerSideDesign was founded in 2004 and over the years has grown to a staff of well-rounded professionals that handle tasks such as SEO copywriting, SEO programming, link building, social networking, pay per click management, web design, and reporting. ServerSideDesign is a proud member of the BBB, SEMPO and many other prestigious organizations. They were named as a top 10 company in 2007 for both Organic SEO and Link Popularity by Promotion World.

Roger Janik has written 46 articles for PromotionWorld.

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If you have not yet heard of microformats, chances are that you will not only hear more about them, but also be using them in the very near future.  Microformats, while not necessarily a transformation technology has a very good chance of being a staple for web developers and those that practice SEO.  While microformats have been around for several years, they are now building up stream and the big search engines such as Google and Yahoo have taken notice.  Below, you will find a quick review and some tips on how to use this simple, but promising technology to your advantage.

What is a Microformat?

While web developers today primarily use html code to create web pages and convey data from a website to an end user and search engine robots, for those looking to make the information on their web pages more easily readable, better understood and more relational, one web based approach that is quickly becoming popular is the microformat. 

A microformat is a basic, but effective way to create a semantic markup.  Meaning, a microformat is a snippet of code that a browser or search engine can read and actually understand what it is- instead of simply displaying it.  A microformat can easily convey all types of information that can be collected, read, understood and automatically processed by a wide range of software.  The types of information that microformats can currently convey include contact information, geographic coordinates, calendar events, reviews, products, social relationships (XFN) and more.

Microformats Help Structure Your Information Easily
When a search engine robot views your webpage, it might fully be able to read and display the information on it, but it doesn’t necessarily understand the information or relationships within this information.  Microformats help to parse information located on your website.  A microformat is a snippet of information that not only offers content, but also a relationship which search engines are now able to understand. 

For instance, Google currently understands and can utilize the hProduct microformat for publishing details of a product as part of their Rich Snippets tool.  Below is a sample of a hProduct microformat:

As you can see from the above sample there is plenty of information included in this hProduct microformat.  It includes the brand, category, fn (product name or title), price, description, and URL.  However additional information is optional including image, review, identifier, etc.  This way, when Google’s robots view your web page, they just don’t see an entire page of possibly unrelated information, they now are able not only to read the information quickly and easily, but understand that this is a microformat snippet and that all the information within it relates to each other.

Now, Google understands that the $39.99 in the above snippet is not just a random number, but the actual price of the Ace rechargeable drill.  This way, Google will index this information differently so that it can be displayed in search results more effectively.  For instance, if you do a search in Google for “Sony TV”, you will see up at the top, a group of listings of Sony TV sets, that also include the price and reviews.  This information is structured with the help of the hProduct microformat.

Other Key Uses for Microformats

Besides the hProduct microformat, one of the most basic and possibly useful microformats is the hCard.  The hCard microformat makes it easy to structure contact information about a person or business.  This way, an end user along with the search engines can easily find this info, recognize it easily and for search engines use it appropriately for a wide range of services.  For instance, Google Maps, can use your hCard info when doing a search for a specific location, the same is true with the geo microformat.

Using Microformats and SEO

There are plenty of benefits for using microformats and for those that practice SEO, you should definitely keep track of how the search engines are integrating this technology and using it to rank and share this info with the end user. 

Just some of the benefits of using microformats is that it helps not only the search engines, but users find and parse information about your website, business, products, etc (anything within the microformat).  For businesses that are looking to optimize their site for a local area, microformats can possibly increase results found in local directory listings for all the big search engines.  Microformats also help the search engines understand your website better.  A microformat can offer precise information to a search engine helping you rank quickly and more effectively.

As you can see, microformats are a relatively easy way to convey specific information in a snippet that search engines and end users can instantly understand the relevance of.  With more and more web developers implementing this technology on their pages, you can be sure that the search engines will expand on how they use this information.  Already, Yahoo, Google and others big search engines and websites are using microformats in a wide variety of ways which will make the web much more semantic and ultimately give the end user a better search experience.  As far as implementation, including microformats on web pages is fairly straightforward and definitely worth the effort, especially if you are selling products (hProduct), offer reviews (hReview), would like to offer contact information (hCard) or planning an event (hCalendar).  The microformat has definitely shown its value and you can be sure that the search engines will be looking for more ways to use it and integrate it into their services.