Now a days it’s best to use micro formats while placing addresses, reviews etc. It will give a clear picture to the search engines about the information we are providing.

Thanks
Sankar

I feel that SE’s do what u say – but I know they won’t do it simply because if someone gets all the info by simply typing the exact info he/she is looking for – then nobody is going to invest in SE’s ad networks as they could optimize their sites and look for simple organic results.

Sadly – ur thoughts are right all the way – just not business-wise viable for SEs. No SE would provide such exact result whatever their public opinion might be.

Frankly, I am getting a Déjà vu effect while going through the “Google Squared” application because it appears to be very similar in function to my United States patent application which was filed on April 12, 2007 and as publicly disclosed by the United States Patent and Trademark Office on October 16, 2008, when the patent application was published.

My patent application is titled as “Method And System For Research Using Computer Based Simultaneous Comparison And Contrasting Of A Multiplicity Of Subjects Having Specific Attributes Within Specific Contexts” bearing Document Number “20080256023” and Inventor name “Nair Satheesh” which may be viewed at http://patft.uspto.gov/ upon Patent Applications: Quick Search.

Google Squared appears to be using at least some if not many of the same methods and systems as set forth by me more than two years ago in my patent application. In fact there are many more methods and systems disclosed in my patent application which I believe will help resolve certain inaccuracies found in current Google Squared application.

I have issued legal notices to Google through my Patent Attorney in the US but Google has not responded yet to any of my notices.

I became an SEO for one reason — to make low cost conversions for myself and clients.

The easiest way to do that back in the day was organic search. These days it might be Twitter, a Facebook page, an iPhone app, Yelp, etc, etc that performs best for your audience.

I’m mixing disciplines obviously but that is only because of how we have those disciplines labeled today.

This I know — I don’t want to be or want to hire an SEO that can only work search. I want someone that can take my content and drive conversions regardless of the outlet.

I see that role as the future of SEO.

By “other devices and apps” I think you’re referring to Vertical Search – applications such as Urbanspoon and Spoonfed’s Event Radar (London).

There’s no doubt that “search” traffic will start to diversify as applications and search alternatives capture more users – with structured markup being pivotal to inclusion in some of these services.

All that said, most SEO’s would disagree with your comment that the future of SEO is “dead”. It may be that SEO techniques evolve as technology changes, and our core focus (organic search) may become diluted by focusing on vertical search, but there will always be a need to generate traffic to transactional spaces on the web via existing and future platforms. IMO, SEO has only just begun.

This is already true today, but I think with the new markup and content formats you mention we’ll see it become much more prevalent in SEO in the coming years.

Another way to say it would be — in the future I think SEO is dead. It is morphing into Content Optimization or CO

Ryan, you missed the point of the example that the Google Squares result is playing back very little usable data, and that the post identifies this issue could be resolved by the implementation of further Rdfa support (hreview).

There are lots of (early) examples of Rdfa interpretation on Google’s side take this post introducing rich snippets for example.

Finally, implementing this stuff (especially in a new page design) is frighteningly easy and provided your developer / designers understand the class attributes they should use for specific snippets of data, the standards can be implemented very quickly.

And remember, there will always be SEO’s on the edge that will push the boundaries, thus limiting the total effectiveness of any type of standard markup language readable by search engines.

We as Web developers or site owners want that too. If the search engines can send us more visitors who really want our content and fewer that don’t, we’ll see our visitors engage more with our sites, ideally increasing conversions while lowering our bounce rates. Getting designers to adopt things like microformats will take time, but it will add value.

I wrote about using basic semantic HTML mark-up last week as a way to inform both clients and new designers. Currently many designers, bloggers and others aren’t even using things like hierarchical headers (h1…h6), so they may not be ready (yet) for more advanced mark-up. But those that are early to adopt will provide more useful information to search engines and browsers that can, and should, positively impact accessibility and SEO.

I look forward to seeing how this all evolves.

Then I joined PositionTech. We did just that, for the Yahoo! Paid Inclusion program. Structured data inserted directly into the engine, paid so that the program could be justified. The future of this was destined to be free (until Google decides to charge the way we did back then). It’s been the future of SEO for just over 10 years!