Microformats
At the Atlanta SEMPO meeting last night Topher Kohan from CNN spoke on Microformats. Microformats are not new, but they are being used in new ways that affect search. Topher predicts the release of a standardized open source set of microformat tags from the major search engines within the next couple years and states that this will have a huge impact for the future of SEO.
Microformats are a way to provide additional information about content on the web. Significantly microformats make the information portable in other applications. Microformats can enable data items to be indexed, searched, saved, cross-referenced, reused, or combined. With the emergence of social media this additional information can be very useful to users as well as search engines.
Last year Google introduced Rich Snippets which allow them to provide search results with extra relevant information like votes or ratings:
Microformats & Video Optimization
Microformats seem to be particularly relevant for video content. The challenge is no longer getting indexed. Google indexes content extremely quickly to include a tremendous amount of video. With so many videos being indexed it is more difficult for Google to recognize what video should be served for a particular query. Wrapping the video in microformats can help it to rank in the search engines.
Facebook Share helps you to follow where your content goes after it leaves your site. When you use Facebook share you can access a report that will tell you where your video is being embedded, how many views it is getting.
Yahoo Search Monkey allows you to share structured data to help Yahoo display an enhanced result similar to rich snippets.
In September Google announced that they were going to start supporting Facebook share and Yahoo search monkey RFDa Microformat tagging. Topher demonstrated this with actual numbers from his use of microformats with CNN video content. More news and examples are available at http://microformats.org/
I think that it is important to point out that microformats do not trump the other major search ranking factors. As Topher explained, if two pages are equal in terms of all of the major ranking factors, microformats can help one of the pages perform better in search.
Topher also mentioned the microformats cheat sheet which will be useful to guide our efforts in this area.
