Perhaps you’ve heard about microformats and that microformats are good for your page’s SEO, but what exactly is a microformat and how can it help your site. Read on to get a primer on microformats and to find how to leverage this for your site.
What are microformats?
Simply put, microformats are a way to publish information and share them on the web more clearly and more effectively. To be more technical about it though: microformats are little bits of code (meaning you use them in HTML) that tell search engines and people about the information contained in your site.
For example, if you own a company and want your contact information found easily on the web, you can use the hCard microformat to publish that information on the web.
Advantages of Microformats
Microformats have been around for a bit, and search engines such as Bing and Google have already embraced the format. In fact, Bing and Google have added to the Webmaster’s toolkit tools that focus on monitoring and then fixing problems with microformats.
- Search Engines Love Them
As mentioned above, the big search engines have shown “support” for the microformat, so using these in your sites is something that you should definitely do. If the search engines are taking notice and giving priority to these microformat-enabled sites then there’s really no reason why you shouldn’t be doing it for your site as well.
- More Control of SERP snippets
Have you seen those snippets of information that Google shows on the search results? Well, Google uses an algorithm to choose the snippet that it displays for each page. This doesn’t always result in a snippet that convinces people to click and go to your site. Sometimes the snippet just sounds and reads weird, but since it’s done automatically there’s really no way that you can ensure the snippet will come out like you want it to.
With microformats however, you will be able to affect the snippet that Google will display about your site. This will give you more “control” over the kind of snippet that Google puts out.
- Easy To Use
Another beautiful thing about the microformat is that it is not a new language. Also don’t need to be a programmer to be able to use microformats. Your web authors or web designers can easily add these microformats. How easy are microformats to use? Well, if you want a comparison, you should know that publishing an RSS feed is a whole lot more difficult than using microformats. Almost anyone can be taught how to use HTML+CSS and microformats.
- Easy to Implement for WP and Magento
If you are already using WordPress and Magento then you are in for another good news: you don’t have to change what you are currently using. These changes are very easy to implement for both Magento and WordPress.
Microformats are easy to learn and implement. It would be a waste if you didn’t take the time to invest in learning more about microformats and implementing them into your site.