Using hCard Microformats for SEO (Search Engine Optimization)

Yesterday, I attended a training session, where Derek Brown from Pronto Marketing shared some advanced strategies for SEO with us. Derek’s presentation was great…amazing in fact. One of the items that he breezed by, but seemed to really emphasize, was hCards and how Google and Microsoft have really starting to embrace microformats in general. I’d heard about microformats before, but had not really taken the plunge. Having said this:

Microformats are a practical way to make data items (such as events, contact details or geographical locations) recognizable to Search Engines, without breaking existing page formatting that is easily read by humans. This is done by adding a set of "class" attributes that can be added to divs and spans in an HTML page to tag content with semantic meaning. For example, my hCard looks like a standard block of text:

To get this, I used the following HTML:

Adding this small amount of markup can have significant SEO results. Moreover, you can style this block with CSS by using the class names directly, or by adding a second styling class like this to any of the tags: More...