What are Microformats?
The first time someone asked me about it a year ago, I looked at them with a puzzled look. Ask most web developers today and you’d likely get a similar response. It’s one of those bleeding edge web development initiatives that’s slowly taking root.
Microformats are a method of tagging your content which makes it possible for other web applications to recognize it as a certain type of content. For example, if you tagged your mailing address details using the hCard syntax, another application that is able to recognize this code will be able to pull in your mailing address details and display it as a true mailing address.
How do Microformats Relate to SEO?
Google recently started integrating content that used Microformats directly within their search results for particular queries.
Although still relatively new Microformats could have a couple of SEO benefits such as:
- Improving your CTR (click-through rate) for search results by making your search result stand out from others
- Google may give preferences for content with Microformats such as “review” type queries for results that utilize the hReview format
- Ecommerce sites may benefit from the hProduct markup which may help expose product data & specifications and could be used as part of a product feed
So although Microformats may not be prevalent in your web development bag of tricks, it may be worthwhile to keep tabs on it for the time being and see whether you can begin integrating it into your web development plans.
If anyone’s used Microformats or has experimented with it. I’d love to hear your take on it.
For more info on Microformats here are some great resources:
- Rimm-Kaufman’s take on Microformats & Google
- Google Announces Support for Some Microformats
- Microformats.org
- John Andrew’s Take on Microformats & Structured Data
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