Microformats provide immediate search visibility (from: The Community Engine Blog)
http://thecommunityengine.com/home/archives/2005/06/microformats_pr.html
Unlike structured blogging, microformats offer tangible business benefits that are being realized by companies today. Technorati’s use of the reltag microformat to propel itself to high search visibility offers one case study.
Recently, John Battelle and Charlene Li have taken up the subject of structured blogging. The underlying issue is making publishers’ data visible to specialized web aggregators. These aggregators make a business of publishing specialized content like movie reviews, typically perceiving revenues from advertising placed around the targeted content.
Most reviewers perceive the discussion so far to be largely theoretical. This perception is actually incorrect. Technorati, a blog search engine, has been making profitable use of a related but simpler technology called microformats for the past six months.
Specifically use of the reltag microformat has propelled technorati to top search results for niche terms like podcasting and “social software”. The increased search visibility translates into more traffic to technorati’s pages and more exposure for their sponsored links.
The advantage of microformats is that they tap into the web’s infrastructure as it exists today. Unlike structured blogging, microformats are based on html, the most widely recognized markup on the web. As a result, information embedded in microformats is immediately available to search crawlers and easily implemented by most web page designers.
From a business perspective, it makes sense to tap into this virtuous feedback loop. Using an already accepted standard means your innovation is more easily adopted. More adopters means it is more attractive to build services that use the innovation. The more services that use the innovation, the more attractive it is to implement and so on.
Technorati Tags: google, microformats, search, technorati