Running a website is so much more than attracting visitors to your pages. You need to focus on the user experience, too. You may have heard about the microformat citations importance, or you may be sitting there scratching your head. Either way, these elements can help to ensure your website content is delivered in an easy-to-understand, practical way that improves the overall user experience.
Let’s say that a website visitor wants to collect content that they have read online. This may be for the purposes of creating a catalog, adding notes for reading later or generating citations in other formats that they can include in their own publication. You, as the website owner, can make their life easier by creating discoverable descriptions of self-citations that the user’s browser or aggregator can collect automatically. These citations may appear as an additional structure within the user’s browser bookmarking system or explicitly collected using an application.
Examples of microformat citations may include:
- a list of publications for a forthcoming conference
- a publication list for a conference
- the publications from a specific researcher or research group
- the publications of a popular author
The Microformat Citations Importance
Microformat citations are widely used on some of the most important websites available today, including Google, Facebook, Twitter and Yahoo! The content authors, developers and designers for these websites understand the flexibility and power of microformats and how to take advantage of their functionality. Any website can make good use of microformat citations. In doing so, you can improve standards compliance and SEO, help users to add semantic richness to their own websites and support the extensible publishing of data.
A Micro-Formatted Citation Not to Be Overlooked
The name address and phone number also known as the NAP of your business, needs to be uniform and consistent across the Internet so that Google and other search engines recognize references to your business as exact match and relevant. Micro-formatting your NAP, and having it appear in the footer of your website makes it crystal clear to search engines who you are according to your website. On WordPress websites this can be accomplished in a matter of seconds using plug-ins like this one. Rich Contact Widget available in the WordPress repository.
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