I’ve been studying up on microformats. Kind of like going to the dentist. Its not the most interesting of SEO subjects, but can be a pretty powerful SEO tool.

What are microformats?

For some websites, you can enhance the display of your search result in search engines. This is referred to as “rich snippets” in the industry.

Generally speaking, microfomats describe a way to markup data in the code of a webpage in order to pass along information to whatever is reading the code (like a search engine). Take an address for example. 123 Main Street in Sacramento, CA can easily be interpreted by a human. But a website may write the state as CA, Calif, California or not even include a stats. Machines may have a difficult time recognizing every way an address can be formatted. Microformats are a way to describe data to a machine (in this case Google) by telling your webpage which text is the address and which is the region. Below are a few microformat examples and how they change a search result.

hreview – adds 5 star review information

The image below shows a star rating underneath the result in Google and the price range.

Image from Google's Rich Snippet Testing Tool

hcard – adds people-based information

You can see in the image below additional information for the person’s location and job title.

Image from Google's Rich Snippet Testing Tool

hevents – adds additional information to event pages

An event site listing in search may show additional events within the main result, as shown in the image below.

Impact to Results

This will impact search results pages by lengthening the page, since each result will now carry additional lines of microformat information. Also, a #3 result with all the extra information in its listing will probably get more click through than the #1 and #2 “plain” results above them.

Why General Photographers Should Wait

Search engines are still catching up to using this technology. Google allows you to submit your site to be included in the rich snippets testing. One look at this form and you’ll see why only a very advanced photographer website would qualify for this submission.

High trust domains like LinkedIn.com and Yelp.com are currently being index, but for everyone else its a waiting game. I’ve heard of MAJOR websites submitting for review, with no response and no updates in the search engines even months after their submission.

If you want to try it out my formatting your own site, I found the article Google & Microformats: Drive More Traffic helpful. When you’re done, check out how your new page would look in search results. Its not something I would spend a lot of time on (as a photographer). Anything you tag now won’t show up, possibly for a very long time. The reason to tag now would be to save time later in going back to old pages once the results are more prolific for smaller sites.

For now, just keep aware of the ability of the technology and how it can potentially affect search engine display in the future as more sites get their microformat data allowed in Google and Yahoo.

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