In the last few months you would have probably have noticed that Google is displaying rich snippets more and more in the search results. Rich snippets are various types of information about your web page including reviews, price author, address etc.

Rich snippets are made possible by two large standards called microformats and RDFa. But how can adding rich snippets to your site improve your SEO?

There are many benefits of adding rich snippets, firstly you might want to add the mark-up code to your contact us page. This will ensure that Google picks up your contact details accurately, which will help improve local searches, and listings in Google local.

Rich snippets are also great when optimising an ecommerce site which sells products online. You can use microformats to mark-up the title, description, and reviews so that these are picked up by Google and displayed in the SERPs. Having reviews of your products gives you a better chance of attracting a click and a potential sale.

Website owners will need to implement microformats into their site to help improve click through rates and conversions whilst reducing bounce rates. Having well structured data on your site will stand you out from your competitors, and improve the user experience of your site

A great example of microformats that can be added to most sites is adding mark-up to your contact page using a ‘hcard’. You can use DIV and span tags on your contact page to identify single pieces of information.
For example the code below shows my name and company name using the hcard microformat.

1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9

    <div class="vcard">
<div id="hcard-Paul-Anthony-Spreadbury" class="vcard">
 <span class="fn n">
    <span class="given-name">Paul</span>
  <span class="additional-name">Anthony</span>
  <span class="family-name">Spreadbury</span>
</span>
 <div class="org">Just Search</div>
    </div>

If you struggle to understand and write your own contact page microformat you can use this great hcard creator. Simply enter your details and this tool will create the hcard code for you.

This new method to make a more semantic internet will provide users with the opportunity to search through richer data, providing a better experience. You should start adding this microformat to your site as soon as possible as the search engines especially Google will be very aware of this.