Microformats are good, and Google recently announced they would start supporting two of them: hCard and hReview. Think of hCard like an official business card for the Web. hReviews are reviews for products, restaurants, etc., which you might find on an Amazon product page or Yelp.com. Your favorite SEO voodoo daddy will tell you that Google will shine upon your site if they find you’re using extremely semantic markup with the likes of Microformats.
Even if you’re making simple websites, they always contain contact information — why not publish it in an hCard format? Use Tantek Çelik’s easy hCard creator to start.
Don’t have any street addresses on your site? You can still sneak one in for author contact information. Any link pointing to the author can be made into a vCard like this:
<span class="vcard"><a href="http://author_domain" class="fn url">Author Name</a></span>
There are many ways to start using Microformats today and it becomes addicting. It is now impossible for me to accept br tags inside street addresses. I hope to see more uses for Microformats in the future. For example, if you visited a site that contained an hCard, the browser could facilitate a download right to your address book.
For further reading, try Andy Clarke’s article, “A tribute to Microformats“. Also, check out John Allsopp’s excellent Know Your Microformats section on his blog, Microformatique.
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