Yahoo recently announced that it will begin formally supporting microformats and other semantic Web standards. Site owners can markup pages with microformats like hCard, hCalendar, hReview, hAtom and XFN to the HTML code on a page, or create structured feeds using RDF (resource definition framework).

By implementing these open standards, site owners can classify certain elements on the page as contact information, events, reviews, episodic content, etc. Yahoo can take the structured content and more easily incorporate it into their index and that's just what they are going to do.

By indexing microformats, Yahoo! is giving developers and web site owners a big incentive to start using them. According to the post: "The data is already there, we just need to give people a reason to identify it. Content owners want to expose their structured data, but so far there's been no killer consumer application giving them a reason to do it. Search can be that killer app," said Amit Kumar, director of product management for Yahoo Search. 

Many web professionals unfortunately fail to understand how to use these markup formats on their own sites (and how useful they can be - perhaps in securing better rankings at Yahoo!) regardless of whether the data is there or not - Yahoo is trying to change that. All in all, it's actually pretty easy to implement microformats if you've already got the data in a static format or are running applications which can be retro-fitted with this important semantic data.

Create A few Microformats For Your Website:

• People and Organizations: hCard Creator.
• Calendars and Events: hCalendar creator
• Opinions, Ratings, Reviews: hReview Creator

Related Posts from Website Magazine:

• Microformats for SEO
• POSH: Plain Old Semantic HTML