In order to designate review content on a web site, the specific microformat hReview is used. It can assist in getting your review sites indexed and found by search engines like Bing, and make your site more friendly to other web applications. Taking existing XHTML or HTML tags, passed in a systematic way, you can make easy distinction of what your data is about for search engines, when using microformats. Other specific microformat examples include hCard which contains contact information, hCalendar which is used for events, and hProduct to describe products. When using microformats, your website isn’t rendered any differently by the web browser. Microformats simply make the source code ‘smarter’ in a sense, and allow easier communication with web applications, to help them understand better what the underlying content is about.

Within the hReview microformat there are several properties. The properties include the date and time the review was written, the author or reviewer, the item that was reviewed, the rating given to the item, a permalink and a brief summary. Have a quick peek at: http://microformats.org/wiki/hreview-profile if you have specific formatting questions about the hReview microformat or any of its properties.

To learn how to create a review site to easily and automatically integrate the hReview microformat, check out this article: Create A Review Site

When using the hReview microformat and its properties in your source code you will be at an advantage in the Google SERPS. You will be feeding information to Google to use its Rich Snippets feature. Google defines this feature as ‘giving users convenient summary information about their search results at a glance’. You can see a rich snippet summary of reviews made for Piccolos Restaurant for example when doing a Google search for ‘piccolos italian restaurant’. With this rich snippet, the Google searcher can now see at a glance, a quick summary of the reviews for the particular product or service they were searching for. This data will only be pulled from your web site if you are implementing the hReview microformat in your source code.

To see the different types of review sites marketers use, with examples, read this post: Review Web Site Samples

The simple addition of hReview tags to your web content can turn a simple site into a review site. It can enhance your listing in a web surfers search, giving them the chance to see useful and relevant information from your page making it more likely for them to click through to your content.

No related posts.