Last week google announced on its webmaster blog something called Rich Snippets which is basically a way of marking up Structured data using microformats or/and RDFa on your web pages.
Rich Snippets are used to mark up things like Reviews, People, Products, Businesses and organizations that Google will use in its search results pages to give a user a convenient summary of their results at a glance before visiting a web page.
Wow! for the kind people who have been actively involved in developing and advocating Microformats and RDFa this is really good news and its been a long time coming.
We have arrived at a new Era of SEO, as Michael Hausenblas (one of the key developers of RDFa) said "Let's call it semantic SEO", I like that, others may call it SEO3.0 or SEO++ whatever its all the same thing, Just SEO to me with more professionalism and intelligence.
For Search Engine Optimization in particular I agree with Michael, If you use Rich Snippets then you can expect a reduction in Bounce Rates, higher conversion rates, More customers, More Money. There are I think one or two down sides to consider, the popular practice of Back-Link building and Modifying Header tags may over time become less relevant because these very small nuggets of data will have less meaning compared to the data contained in a Rich Snippet.
A final thought from Jay Myers (one of the developers of the hProduct Microformat)
...microformats, RDFa, and related mark-up methods go beyond SEO and Google; they can serve as the front-end to a dynamic, smarter web of linked data. Don't implement microformats as a "silver bullet" for SEO. Implement them because your users deserve better, more concrete data regardless of the path they take to discover your products.
Well said.
