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.
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.
Photo by: Mango Escobar
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.
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.
Chris Silversmith writes “Should You Geotag Pages For Local SEO?” over at Search Engine Land today, giving a thorough overview of the hCard Microformat, its uses and possible alternatives.
In his post, Chris writes:
In the past, I’ve strongly recommended the use of semantic markup in the form of hCard microformats as a component of local search optimization. hCard allows contact info such as addresses and phone numbers to be disclosed precisely to devices that are able to read them.
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