hReview Sites Getting Indexed
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. For more information and specific formatting questions regarding hReview properties check out the following site: http://microformats.org/wiki/hreview-profile.
To learn how to create a review site to easily and automatically integrate the hReview microformat, check out this article: Review Site Wordpress
Properly formatting and using the hReview microformat in your web content will allow you to take advantage of several web features including Google’s Rich Snippets feature. Google defines this feature as ‘giving users convenient summary information about their search results at a glance’. If you search ‘piccolos italian restaurant’ on Google the number one result includes a rich snippet summary of the reviews available on the City-Search site. As the example demonstrates the rich snippets allow a surfer to search for a product and/or service and then see a quick summary of the reviews of that product on any particular site. 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 Site Examples
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.
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