What are microformats?

Microformats are basically existing HTML and XHTML tags structured in a standard way to convey specific information, like address, events, reviews etc. They are not intended to directly help end-users but are instead intended to be interpreted by software. 

Microformats are viewed by some as the 1st step along the path to the “Semantic Web”, Sir Tim Berners-Lee's vision of the Web in the future. 

What do they do?

Microformats make it easier for software to identify specific information and determine how this information should be handled. For example a search engine spider crawling a website would come across a contact page on a website with a Microformat h-card (web version of a v-card). From this page it would then very easily be able to categorise the information into name, address, phone number, email address, longitude and latitude etc...  

How can they help search engine optimization?

It is already rumored that Yahoo! Is giving a big weighting to Microformats in your web pages and also that Google in the US is using it for contact and location information. Weather this is true or not nobody can say, however, from my research it is certainly more than a co-incidence that a lot of the higher ranking sites have microformats installed. This is particularly prevalent in directory listing websites.

To understand why Microformats are gaining in popularity and weighting in the search engines all you have to do is picture a couple of senarios:

  • You are searching for someone online. So you type their name into Google. You are then presented with the persons contact details, links to websites they have profiles on, a picture and even their company contact details.
  • You are searching for a product “Nintendo Wii”. You are returned with not only a list of websites that sell the Wii but also a list of reviews, average ratings, prices for comparison and many other product details.
  • Microformats can also be used to store information about events. So if you were looking for information on an upcoming event you could search for the event name or even date and you’d find out the name, date and time and could even be provided a map to the location. 

All this is very useful information to the user and for that reason alone will help your site move up the rankings on the major search engines. 

What Microformats are available?

At the moment you can use Microformats to describe, contact information and events. More and more formats are being developed by the active community at microformats.org and there are some extremely interesting ones in the pipeline for launch in the near future. These include:

  • Audio
  • Product info
  • Recipes
  • Resumes
  • Reviews

And many many more.