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.
The hReview microformat is broken into several different properties including the date/time the review was written, a summary of the review, the author, the item being reviewed, a rating, a permalink to the review, and others. For more information and specific formatting questions regarding hReview properties check out the following site: How To 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’. 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. Google only pulls this data from your site if you are using the hReview in your source code.
To see the different types of review sites marketers use, with examples, read this post: Types Of Review Sites
With the data that hReview provides to the web surfer, you can be certain you will see more of a click through rate to your site when this data is used. It’s nice to know some specific details before going any further and microformats allows you to easily give that extra info.
