What exactly are microformats and how can they help my SEO? If you’re like many SEOs or developers I know, you’ve probably heard some talk about microformats, but you’ve probably got some questions.

You may remember an old blog post of mine where I lamented that nobody really supports hCard. Thankfully the day has finally come where sites are supporting hCard, but it’s not because of my previous bitching. It’s because of SEO and search engines.

Sometime last year, Google announced what they call “rich snippets”. Rich snippets are Google’s way of presenting more useful information from your site right in the search results snippet. They look something like this:

Shortly after we started seeing them in search results for sites like Yelp and Linkedin. Then, at SMX advanced in Seattle, Google let it be known that they’d soon be rolling out rich snippets across all websites whenever the algorithm decided that they would be useful. This is very similar to how they treated site links.

This is great news! Since preliminary studies have shown that things like rich snippets increase click throughs, the obvious question becomes “how the heck can I get them on my site?”

Microformats are the answer. Now, before you go thinking “oh great, I’ve got to learn another programming language, I’m still struggling with jQuery” you can relax. Implementing microformats is simple – and it’s all done with HTML that you already know.

While there are several types of microformats, Google currently only supports 6 major ones. Those are:

1. hcard – for marking up business card or profile information
2. hReview – for dealing with individual user reviews
3. hReview-aggregate – basically a summary of hReviews (think, overall or average rating)
4. hProduct – for marking up products, prices, and all things e-commerce
5. hCalendar – pretty self explanatory, dates and appointments
6. hRecipe – also pretty explanatory. Recipes and ingredients

If your site deals with any of those categories, you should explore the possibilities of using microformats. There’s a great guide over a Microformats.org (which I won’t copy here, so go take a look when you’re done reading) but when it comes down to it, implementation is as simple as tagging your content with classes.

Here’s an example. Instead of just typing Name: Ryan Jones the hCard way to do this would be:
<span class=”fname” >Ryan Jones</span>

This tells Google, or anybody else for that matter, that my “full name” is “Ryan Jones.” I can use the same style markup on my phone number, address, email, picture, homepage URL, and even nickname.

So what are the SEO benefits? Let’s look at an example.

Here’s 2 search results from LinkedIn. One has microformats, the other doesn’t. Which one do you think is more useful? Which one are you more likely to click?

Without Rich Snippet (no microformats)

With Rich Snippet (has microformats)

The 2nd snippet here not only looks better, but it’s way less ambiguous than the first one – especially since there’s at least 25 Ryan Jones’s on LinkedIn. It goes beyond the generic LinkedIn META description and pulls in basic information. In this case, it tells you I’m from the Detroit area and that I work at ZAAZ.

The difference is even more astounding when you look at something with reviews. Let’s look at a rich snippet that uses both hReviews AND hRecipe.

Which of the following results would you be more tempted to click on?

Here, ThaiTable out ranks FoodNetwork for the query “pad thai” – but I’d be willing to bet that FoodNetwork.com is getting more traffic from Google for this query.

Ok, I’ve tagged my site, can I test it? Yes! Google webmaster tools offers a Rich Snippet Tool that will not only show you a preview of your site’s rich snippet, but it also tells you what information Google sees available.

Microformats may not directly increase your search engine rankings, but they can still be a vital part of your SEO strategy. Ranking on page 1 of Google isn’t all there is to SEO – you’ve still got to entice the searcher to click. Rich snippets may be just thing to do that.

Go ahead, give ‘em a try. I’d love to hear your success stories here in the comments.

Today we continue my SEO’s believe some crazy shit series. A few days ago we looked at whether or not google analytics affects SEO. Today I want to shift gears a bit.

Several years ago a colleague of mine interviewed a candidate for an SEO position who recommended paying people in other cities to search for your term and then click on your site. He said a good policy would be to make employees do this whenever they’re out of town as well. He attempted to back up his claims by referencing the fact that Google tracks historical click data, but was eventually thanked for his time.

Now, I know what you’re thinking. Yes, it IS true that Google may use SERP click data. They even filed a patent on doing it (If you’re too lazy to read the patent, SEOmoz has a nice write up of it.)

Before we freak out and start creating Mechanical Turk jobs to click on our results, let’s apply some computer science logic to this.

IF Google used what results you clicked on as a major factor in their SEO algorithm, what would happen? It would start a completely self serving cycle. The results already on the front page would get more clicks, and rank higher – getting them even more clicks! It’d be a vicious cycle. Sure, you could introduce some randomness to it, but where would you pull those random results from?

You couldn’t just throw completely random results at the front page and let the click history sort it out. The top 5 results would get clicks regardless of what was there, and the overall search quality would be terrible. So IF you wanted to do the randomness to prevent the above cycle, you’d have to pull from somewhere. The most likely place would be the results on page 2.

But what factors determine the results on page 2? You can’t use click data here, as results after page 1 get very few clicks – so you’re back to links and on page elements.

And that’s the point I’m trying to make: Even if Google uses historical click data in ranking, links and content are still way more important. In fact, if your links and content aren’t up to snuff, click-rate won’t make one bit of difference.

My advice: Don’t worry about click rate, site speed, or other minor factors. They won’t matter unless your site already ranks well – and that’s the goal you should be focused on.

Raise your hand if you believe that using Google Analytics can affect your site’s SEO rankings. Now raise your other hand if you believe Google Adwords also affects your SEO.

If you’ve got both hands in the air keep them that way, as having your hands off of the keyboard is probably the best SEO strategy for your website right now.

I had been under the impression that Matt Cutts put this myth to rest several times (see video below) however some recent forum threads make it hard to maintain faith about the general public’s SEO opinion. It’s not just SEOs either. I’ve seen this level of thinking with fortune 500 clients as well. In fact, I’ve even seen some analytics platforms use the “don’t share your data with google” angle in their sales pitches. By the way, if you clicked that link I know what you’re thinking and yes, I read black hat forums. Is there something wrong with that?

Sadly, (and chime in if you can think of one) there’s no proper controlled way to test this. Since we can’t scientifically prove that Analytics has no effect on SEO, there’s only a couple of ways we can look at this.

1. We can take Google’s word for it

That’s well and good, but I know exactly what people like Graywolf are going to say here. “Why would Google tell you the truth if they did use it? Wouldn’t that just get you to stop using their products?” And I agree. If you already believe it’s a conspiracy, taking the conspirator’s word for it doesn’t help much. It’s like trying to use the bible to prove God exists. Let’s move on.

2. We can look at anecdotal evidence

People have been claiming ill effects after installing GA for years on webmaster world. But does that make it so, or is it simply a timing or correlation/causation mistake? We’ll never know because webmaster world doesn’t let you list sites for examples, but I’d be willing to bet I can look at any site claiming this and come up with other non GA reasons why the rankings are down.

I’ve been debating this whole post whether or not I want to out some spammy sites, and I’ve decided against it – however for every claim that GA is affecting rank I can name several examples of sites that rank #1 for competitive terms, are pretty spammy in quality, have been ranking #1 for years, and use Google analytics. I could even name a couple of my own sites that fall into this category (I mean come on, who doesn’t test and experiment right?)

So anecdotal evidence didn’t provide much help. I can find some for and some against, but that’s exactly what I expected to find – since if all the anecdotal evidence said the same thing we probably wouldn’t even be asking the question to begin with.

3. We could look at things from Google’s point of view.

When all else fails, this is usually the best bet. WWGD? (site note: maybe I should start selling WWGD wristbands) Whenever I’m in doubt about something in SEO I put on my software engineer hat and think of things from Google’s point of view. To me, it wouldn’t make sense to use Google Analytics data in rankings. There’s several reasons for this.

Google doesn’t need to use your analytics data, their index contains most of it anyway. Think about it. What can google get from your Analytics account that a good index of the web wouldn’t already tell you? They know about all of your pages, they know what sites link to your pages, they know how many clicks you get from search, and they know what keywords you rank for. They also know all of this about all of the sites linking to you. Sure there’s other data they can get from analtyics like paths, funnels, conversion rates, etc – but none of those things really make sense to use in rankings. Think about it, how would what the visitor does once they’re on your site affect whether or not your site is relevant for a term? It wouldn’t!

So just looking at their search index, with a little recursion Google can get all the ranking relevant information without needing analytics – so why use it? From an engineering perspective it would be both slower AND more complex to do so. Plus, what would happen if they ever discontinued analytics? The search engine wouldn’t work without it – and that type of dependency doesn’t fit the Google model of scalable thinking.

It would also be a PR nightmare.
Think about what would happen if word got out that they DID in fact use analytics data? Danny Sullivan would be all over it, Privacy groups would be up in arms, the EFF and ACLU would file lawsuits, the Times would run a front page article, Jesse Jackson would hold a prayer vigil, Graywolf and Pageoneresults would be screaming “I told you so”, and that would bring about the twitter fail whale. They’d never live down the bad PR.

If you don’t think Google takes these things into consideration, perhaps it’s best you raise your hands up in the air too.

You can safely ignore this post. I’m testing something on my server and also playing with word press for iPad. Typing is a pain without a keyboard but I’m getting pretty fast at using my thumbs. Auto spell check is actually helping here (unlike sending a text message where it always screws up my words).

Sadly it looks like I can only attach photos at the bottom so in true blogger fashion, here’s a cat picture.

I’m also wondering if links work. So here’s a link: my softball stats

Interesting after you type “Http:” it brings up a link builder. Wish it just gave that option.

Overall this seems pretty weak. Id like some formatting shortcuts. HTML editing stuff and ability to include images anywhere in a post. I don’t think I’ll be live blogging from my iPad any time soon.

This also concludes my test. This post will be removed in a few days.

I still don’t get the point of bing’s latest Thelma and Louise commercial. If you haven’t seen it yet, check it out below:

What exactly are they trying to say? It just came on with the TV on MUTE and here’s the story it told me:

Women are being chased by cops, they look at google, don’t like what it says so they try Bing. Bing gives them directions, and they follow them right off the cliff.

Ok, that can’t be right. Let’s try another interpretation.

Ladies try switching from Google to Bing, then become so frustrated with the quality of Bing’s results that they drive off of a cliff.

Hmm… that doesn’t seem like a good marketing message either.

I really don’t get this commercial. To me the marketing message is just off. It tells me that a.) Bing caused them to drive off a cliff or b.) they’d rather drive off a cliff than use Bing. I don’t think either of those are the message they were going for.

Pro Marketing Tip: It’s usually never* good to show customers killing themselves or dying when using your product.

*unless of course your product is a funeral casket or assisted suicide machine.