What are Microformats?
Microformats are a way of standardising the structure of commonly used data, such as contact details and event information, and embedding it on a web page, making it more useful to both people and computers. Using a standard structure makes this information much more easily identifiable to computers, making it more attractive to search engines.
They are simple to implement because they can be added to any existing web page and can greatly improve your user experience. They also make the information on your site more readily available for search engines.
The Technical Bit…
In technical terms, Microformats are semantic markup items. They use standard (X)HTML combining a set of common class-names. Anyone can use them as they are open and freely available. But don’t worry about the technical bit… that’s what we’re here for!
How are Microformats Useful?
Let’s say you need someone’s contact details from a web page. Microformats will allow you to copy this information from that person’s web page directly to your address book without having to manually retype all the details or even copy and paste them. More importantly, wouldn’t that be a useful tool to offer visitors to your website?
The same is true of event information – you can provide your company calendar as a download at the click of a button, helping your users and search engines find out about your events.
If you want to retrieve, search or index the same data from websites multiple times or if you want to publish data quickly, you can do so more efficiently than ever with Microformats.
I’m using vCards and vCalendars on my website – isn’t that the same thing?
Microformats provide much the same functionality as vCards, but where they use a separate document, Microformats do it on the actual page, making the information much more readily available to both search engines and users.
Sharing’s Caring!
Microformats are working to decentralise web-based information search, helping to share data in a more productive way. Simply put, if you want people to share and publicise your details and events, Microformats make it much easier to do. Last year Facebook announced that it is using these formats for places and events and many have followed suit since.
If some information already exists on a webpage and you need that information to be incorporated into your own website, you (or your web designer!) do(es) not have to worry about redesigning the data structure at your end.
If you would like to see how Microformats can improve your user experience and your website rankings, please contact us today – call 0117 230 3322 or email [email protected]
To do it yourself, try the Microformat hCard Generator or hCalendar Creator.
