Last month I went over the basics of how to future plan & setup a mobile version of your site correctly both for the user and the search engines.
This month I will go over coding that will play a critical role for mobile in the future as well – microformatting.
Microformatting – includes Microformat, RDFa, & Microdata – allows you to explicitly delineate the property type of the text you are displaying on your site and explained well HERE.
I personally prefer RDFa as Google, to the best of my knowledge, treats them all equally & I feel RDFa will dominate over the long term.
Microformatting is extremely useful to the search engines as this type of coding removes doubt to what you are referring to when you display, for example, an address or phone number.
Currently microformating provides improvement for businesses & products in the search results as they encourage Google to provide rich snippets with those listings.
This can even be used for people, as LinkedIn does, which directly ties a person to their images, nickname, title, organizations, as well friends.
This strikes similar to the recent privacy issues Facebook is facing but with microformatting on your own site you can control this information and mold it to your advantage in the standard & mobile search engines.
Google even provides a crystal ball tool to provide you insight to what your listing will look like with rich snippets based on your microformatting code HERE.
You don’t need a crystal ball to show you how this will also improve your mobile search placement going forward as mobile further separates its results from the standard search.
Mobile search is heavily reliant on location & quick accurate data as most of mobile search is done while being on the go.
That clarity of accurate & local data is gained with microformatting to provide mobile search those more accurate & local results.
