Semantic Markup, Yahoo!, and Where We're Headed

Wouldn't it have been nice to find exactly what you're searching for all these years? Of course, that's what search engines have been working hard to do - especially since Google embarrassed all the other search engines when it came into the market.

So how might this actually be more close to possible now? In recent years, grass-roots standards have been brewing about the nerd community that declare how content should be structured on a webpage. Today, Yahoo! announced their support of these standards.

Among others, they will support microformatting and XFN markup. Essentially, these standards outline how certain types of content should be built with HTML. For example, one microformatting standard is hCard - an HTML based vCard in essence. Now that Yahoo! will support the hCard standard you may be able to search for "Patrick Daly' in Yahoo! and filter the results to only show people. This would eliminate all pages on the Internet that have my name on them, except in the case that my name was structured inside of hCard HTML, which would likely give you lots of good information about me, including my email addresses, phone numbers, locations, and whatever else I choose to make public about myself.

Other examples of microformats are reviews, events, wines (yeah...wines), and blog posts.

In addition, XFN grants the possibilities of making content more inter-related. XFN gives links relationship data. You might link to other business people you work with, so with that link you could attach data that tells the search engines that your link is pointing to a business contact that you have met in person. The possibilities are almost endless for creating a more social web.

So all of this HTML, microformatting, XFN talk is exciting, huh? Ugh...I'm a nerd.

What this will enable us to do is to structure data entered in Lead Maverick automatically in such a way that makes it even MORE useful to search engines and potential customers. The more ways (especially easier ways) people can find you the better, right? See our first example of microformatting on our partner page. Right now it only serves those that have browser extensions to export the contact information of our partners to Outlook. However, once Yahoo! indexes that page with their new system those partners will have structured contact information in Yahoo! results.