Examples of how microformats clarify content
How you understand content vs. how a search engine understands content
Consider this: a famished site visitor stumbles upon a webpage dedicated to a recipe for crème brûlée. Let's assume this page is formatted using standard HTML body tags.
- The words heavy cream, egg yolks, sugar, salt, vanilla, and brown sugar are perceived by the reader as ingredients in that recipe.
- But a search engine crawler perceives these words as ordinary text.
Search engines lump these words in with all of the other ordinary words on every other ordinary webpage out there.
The road to mutual understanding in Crème Brûléeville ends here.
But if those same words, those ingredients, were put into the right microformats, both site visitor and crawler would interpret the structured data in the same way:
- The site visitor would recognize that the items are ingredients in a recipe based on context and common sense.
- The search engine would recognize that the tags attributed to each content item make them ingredients in a recipe.
Now, there are no microformats specific to defining recipes... that was just an example of how tremendously helpful structured data can be for search engines-- allowing them to understand what category of content it's crawling.
By incorporating microformat HTML tags (that don't alter the appearance of your website, by the way), you're targeting your two main audiences: site visitors and search engines. You're getting the best of both worlds, which converge seamlessly on the Semantic Web.
The Semantic Web
The Semantic Web is a term used to describe a marvelous realm where all published content is universally defined by a universal structure; where robots and humans can understand the same language; where webmasters can optimize their pages in a revolutionized way.
Arguably the household name in online search, Google, is pushing forward with structured data for the following content items:
- Reviews
- People
- Products
- Businesses
For now, Reviews and People seem to be the only two active objects, and the feature is currently only compatible with English text. Even so, this is an epic step forward for developers, search engines, and site visitors alike.
Using Microformats to define a product or service review
Consider this: John Doe has a website promoting his restaurant. He wants one page to feature the body text of a recent culinary review of his exquisite establishment. He decides to take the optimal route and employ structured data.
Rather than typing the review into a WYSIWYG, John plugs it into the structured data microformat for Reviews provided by Google. The properties and their corresponding descriptions give a tremendous new weight and clarity to this content:
John doesn't have any experience with microformats, but he doesn't need to. The structured data code requires little more than basic XHTML knowledge:
Now, instead of perceiving John's content as a regular mass of body text, search engine spiders can literally crawl it as a review-- aware of what is being reviewed, who reviewed it, when it was reviewed, how high it was rated, and even a personal summary.
Those simple properties and tags are a heck of a lot more insightful than unstructured data as search engines index and rank SERPs. In turn, the snippets then generated by Google are a heck of a lot more insightful to site visitors as they choose whether or not to click through to John's restaurant's webpage.
Now that you know how microformats work, and how they can help further define content, learn about who benefits from microformats.
