Microformats

What are Microformats?

Microformats are one small pieces of simple code that are used to add more semantic meaning to the content of a web page. From this dynamic, even when for the user they continue to be more text; For Google robots and other search engines, it becomes additional information that they can understand and categorize to show users in a more orderly way.

Its use is something that is becoming very frequent in recent times in all online portals, and it is that, even when Google has not expressly indicated it, it has established certain details that suggest that it is another element with which improve the positioning of a website. By facilitating detection by its engine and, especially, understanding the type of content that is part of these reduced formats, the search engine compensates with that small boost at the SEO level.

They are easily constructed and, broadly speaking, are classified into the following types:

• Company Microformats: used to describe company data that is of interest to search engines. They are usually represented with hCard.
• Events Microformats: used in companies where events are prepared and managed. For this we use the hCalendar.
• Personal Microformats: especially linked to the author of content on a website. In this circumstance, the one used is rel=”author”.
• Reviews microformats: they offer information about the analysis of a service or a product, very present in criticisms or reviews. Here, HTML attributes such as rel or rev are used.

What are Microformats for?

Microformats serve to dictate to Google robots and other search engines the type of information they are reading. For these, all they find is either text or multimedia; In spite of everything, with the reduced formats you can tell them what the information they are detecting refers to, which could be an address, the name of an author or even a review about something.

Even when there is nothing that openly confirms it, they are also useful to boost the positioning of an online portal. Facilitating the understanding by search engines, they consider that it consists of something of quality and that it deserves to climb positions in the SERPs.

Examples of Microformats

As an example of a microformat, let's think about the address that appears for our marketing agency, NeoAttack, on the home page of our website. This could be expressed using the hCard microformat, with the vcard classes and other subclasses such as “adr” or “tel”, leaving something like this in the code:

More information about Microformats

If you want to learn more about Microformats, we suggest you read the articles at the following links.