Category Archives: Microformats & HTML5

Simple Testing Strategy for Microformats Implementation

clowns and stormtrooper

Image credit: KennyMatic

If you’re playing around with SEO based Microformats recommendations for your clients, you might have considered how exactly to test and present those recomendations. What things can you do before sending off an SEO consultation document with Microformats change requests to make you feel confident that your recommendations will work, should Google begin parsing your Microformats in to the search results pages?

The very simple answer is to set up a test page all of your own, and demonstrate the validated test to your target audience. Here’s how:

SEOgadget Gets a HTML5 Upgrade

The past few weeks have been pretty awesome. Regular visitors to the site may have noticed a reduced rate of posting on the site, largely owing to summer holidays, the construction of a new anchor text tool, recruiting our first staff and a HTML5 project.

html5 valid

I’ve written about HTML5 and SEO before, but it’s nice to have your own examples, so I’m delighted to show off the first version of SEOgadget in HTML5 – take a look at the source code!

Applying Microformats to Links – You're Probably Doing It Already

After attending a few days at SES London it has become clear that there’s a small, but growing interest in the use of Microformats in the SEO community. A few folks asked me where they can learn more on the subject, to which my answer is: read John Allsop’s (Excellent) Microformats: Empowering Your Markup for Web 2.0.

This post looks at a few small Microformats that you might be using already…

house

Microformats: Mark-up Your Recipes Online With hRecipe

I love it when Google announces support for new Microformats. In the past we’ve discussed hReview, hCard, and many other draft standards. Today it’s hRecipe‘s turn to get some attention and support from Google.

lemon

Image credit: Hamad M

What is the hRecipe Microformat? [Definition]

hRecipe is a simple, open, distributed format, suitable for embedding information about recipes for cooking in (X)HTML, Atom, RSS, and arbitrary XML. hRecipe is one of several microformats open standards.

http://microformats.org/wiki/hrecipe

Recipe websites are extremely popular on the internet, and it’s actually quite a competitive industry to be part of. So why wouldn’t you investigate the use of hRecipe on your site?

Using the hReview Microformat for your Review Pages

There’s been a continuous and very useful flow of writing on the web around the subject of techniques and products using HTML5 and structured data recently.  The use of structured data in front end web design is a favourite subject of mine, an interest that more frequently influences recommendations in our SEO consulting. Recently I discussed the subject with a client and while it may be impractical to rush off and start rebuilding your website in glorious HTML5 today, there are numerous things you can do to improve the markup of your web pages, actions which perhaps will inspire learning and ideas for how the future version of your website should be built.

HTML5 Examples in the Wild

It’s always fun to speculate what the future holds for us, and this morning I’m going to take a look at an emerging trend that I believe will affect the way SEO’s work in the future, HTML5. We’ve already covered some of the early details of HTML5 and how it will affect SEO, at SEOgadget, but we’ve not yet had the chance to review and bookmark specific examples of HTML5 in the wild.

Pair of Wild Birds - HTML5 Examples in the Wild
Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic License Photo by: Mango Escobar

Draft Microformats – the Future Looks Structured

wind turbines by the russians are here
Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic License Photo by: the russians are here

Microformats have been around for a while and there’s plenty of evidence that search engines wish to continue supporting the emergence of these standards in an effort to better dissect the web’s information. In fact, some known search engineers are directly involved with Microformat development.

Making sure there’s enough support for webmasters and SEO’s, Google have gone so far as to give  tools to test Microformat implementations on webpages and there’s definitely a feeling from all of the search engines that structured data is part of their future.

Google launches Rich Snippets Preview Tool (RDfa)

You (hopefully) remember a few posts on SEOgadget discussing HTML5 and the impact that structured data will have on SEO, and if you do, you’ll remember me banging on about my hcard implemention too. I’ve been convinced for some time now that Google’s attitude towards structured HTML markup is really starting to get serious, which is why today’s news is very exciting.

On this, the last meaningful day of Summer in the UK I say, thanks be to Google for giving us their Rich Snippets Testing Tool allowing even us mere mortals to view and tweak a rich snippet result after implementing a structured markup modification on a site.

The Future of SEO – Structured Markup

Structured Data - the future of SEO

Photo: AsGood

Ever since I started doing SEO, I remember coming across “The Future of SEO” style blog posts, taking a punt at what the future might hold in store for Search Engine Marketers. Among some of the more recent posts on the topic, Rand at SEOmoz gave a lot of weight to user data and the social graph beginning to play a role, while, over at SES San Jose, experts discussed subjects ranging from search query refinement for better results quality, to understanding semantic intent in search queries and the mechanics of mobile search.

The Future of SEO