Microformats are a set of standards for embedding easily extractable data on your pages, using technologies you are comfortable today.
You should be concerned with microformats because there are undoubtedly areas of your site that can take advantage of microformats today, and integration is trivial for your developer team.
Microformats are yet another initiative towards web standardisation, in that is aims to standardise how integral data is structured on the page, promoting a standard data extraction convention. Although there aren’t many services that are indexing information within Microformats, it’s important to ensure your website is future proof and can support these for when services like search engines begin to recognise and process this information. Including Microformats on your site can also build upon Microformats’ exposure on the web, and ideally will promote further adoption of the standard.
Why would we use Microformats for SEO?
VoteLinks
When users link to an article, posting, product, anything they’ll be able to add a new attribute, the rev attribute. Not to be confused with the rel attribute; rel describes what the linked page is to current page whereas rev describes the relationship of the current page is to the page within the link. VoteLinks gives users the flexibility to make their pages ‘vote-for’, ‘vote-against’, or ‘vote-abstain’ the link they are linking to.
E.g.
<p>Visit our <a href=”/SEOBlog/html5-and-seo” rev=”vote-for>great post on HTML5 and SEO</a></p>
This opens up massive potential for search engines. Current search algorithms place priority in the quantity of incoming links, but what if these links could be categorised based on the “rating” they receive based on their vote-for score, and ranked accordingly. This will promote better content with stronger ratings and “bury” poorer quality content – a system not dissimilar to Digg.
As with most standards, widespread adoption is the key influential factor in determining its success. have started implementing microformats into our sites to keep our customers ahead of the game. For example, we’ve included a footer address section which utilizes microformat markup, and we’ve also included a .vcf company details profile that can be downloaded onto your mobile or mail client.
In the next part, we’ll show you how to get started with creating your first vCard Microformat.
You can discuss this topic at the SEO Forum.
This blog was written over 6 months ago and Internet Marketing and SEO is an always changing industry which means the information within this blog may be out of date. Use caution when using any methods or suggestions within it.
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