Blog
06.16
Microformats Are Big News
Just last week, Google announced that they are adding support for microformats to their crawler. Not only was this a great validation for proponents of Web standards, but it gives us a sneak peek into the future of search engines.
Simply said, microformats are a way for developers to tell computers what type of data they're working with. While it may not sound exciting, it has huge implications for SEO and the semantic Web. If you've engaged us for a site recently, or sat down to discuss our processes, you've probably heard us talk about findability. This is essentially a way for us to make your content more recognizable, and microformats are one of the tools we use to accomplish this. With microformats, we can distinguish between information related to a person, a product, or an event in a machine-readable format. This eliminates much of the guesswork search engines need to do when scanning your content.
In search engine terms, it will allow for much more specific results. Imagine that you oogle for reviews of a specific restaurant. Rather than displaying a list of Web sites possibly containing reviews, Google would be able to present you with a list of just the reviews. If you google a name, imagine seeing the person's vcard as the first result in Google. From there, you can easily see where a similar treatment for events, products, businesses, etc. would be extremely beneficial to a consumer.
In the coming years, structured content is going to become much more important in search engine optimization. When users receive more direct information upfront from your site, you're much more likely to stand out from the noise.
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