Want To Add A Map Link To Your Google Search Results?
Wednesday, June 18th, 2008Everybody wants better to make their website stand out on Google right? Well what if you could get a link to a map of where your business is located — in Google’s own search results? Think it can’t be done? Check out this live search results page.
Microformats are a way of adding extra data to the HTML on a web page so that both computers and humans can understand what the information means. This could be information about an upcoming event (date, time, location), or a person or business (name, address, email address, etc). In this case, Google is using contact information marked up using the hCard microformat to display an extra link in it’s search results that displays a map of the business’s headquarters.
Now, adding an extra link to the search results is cool, but it’s nothing compared to what can and will be done as microformats become more popular. Because they allow computers to understand the data on your website better, microformats can lead to smarter search engines, better organization of data, and less manual input of information.
The future of the internet revolves around programs doing their own research and sharing information with each-other, and one of the key technologies will be the use of microformats on the web. Best of all, using microformats has never been easier. If you use Wordpress, check out my recently released Micro Anywhere plugin for Wordpress. Install the plugin and you can be adding event and contact information to your pages and posts within minutes.
The internet has done great things by providing access to nearly unlimited information. The next stage of internet evolution will enable software to understand and process this information for us, so that we only see what we want to see, when we want to see it. Will your site be one of the first to make use of this exciting technology on a massive scale?
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