Microformat - hcard code - New Techniques that helps for SEO and Small Business

Microformats - hcard code - Microformats are a way of thinking about data, design principles for formats, highly correlated with semantic XHTML, a set of simple open data format standards that a diverse community of individuals and organizations are actively developing and implementing for more/better structured blogging and web microcontent publishing in general and much more. It is a way to write code and markup that a Bot should like and as such have the potential to improve your SE ranking.

Microformat Vs. SEO

A microformat like an hCard offers clear information about your organization such as business name, street address, city, telephone etc. to search engines and other services and tools which support this format. Without hCard format search engines have to rely on complex parsing techniques which increase chances of misinterpretation of your business information. As a business owner you certainly would not like to display incorrect information about your business in search results.

Another advantage of using microformat is that your website may get a rich snippet in the search results (as announced by Google). Rich snippets tend to attract more eyeballs resulting in increased traffic to your site. See the example listing below from Google (rich snippet highlighted with red marker) –

At the time of writing this post Google is displaying rich snippets in SERP for sites using microformat. As the number of microformat adopters reaches critical mass, all search engines and tools that provide data aggregation services will be forced to adopt this standard. Adopting microformat standards now, you will save yourself a lot of tweaking (to conform to microformat standards) in future. Besides, being an early adopter, your business information may already get used in multiple ways by services and tools which support microformats, leading to more publicity for your site.

How to create Microformats

To create microformats for your web pages quickly you can use these online microformat creation tools. To get a clear idea of how microformats are created and look like check out these examples. Additional information (specific to Google) about creating microformats can be found here. Google even has a rich snippet testing tool that will allow you to see how your web page would look like in SERP after implementing microformat.