Are micro formats and schema.org a worthwhile investment of my time?

[blacey]

Hi all,

I recently watched this webinar http://www.seomoz.org/webinars/microformats-real-life-use-cases and it was very good, but I'm not entirely certain if this is a worthwhile thing to be doing?

I have a couple of websites I'm improving the SEO on, and things are slowly picking up but I'm not sure if I should be spending time working on improving my landing pages (once these have been identified) or working on the code side of improving my SEO position.

When improving my landing pages I'm asking myself the following questions:

1. What is this page about? (Is it clear through headings or introduction text / imagery
2. Does the page sell the benefits of the product / service in a clear manor?
3. Does the page explain what the product is all about?
4. Is the information easy to read, well positioned on-screen and is the content optimised for 1, maybe 2 distinct keywords.
5. Is there an easy method of communication to the site owner if the visitor is interested in the product or service and wants either a quote or wants to find out more.
6. Are there a few links to other relevant areas of the site

Granted at the moment I'm in the process of teasing the relevant information out of the client but that's like trying to get blood out of a stone, so I'm exploring other avenues, while they get more content.

I am considering going down the route of guest blogging, to possibly get a one-way followed backlink, but again this seems like a lot of effort with no clear guarantee if my efforts in doing this will pay off in being able to generate more leads / enquiries from the websites.

Would anyone like to share their thoughts on this?

[blacey]

Thank you for the link Thomas, I agree I'm always dubious when looking at posts saying "X% increase in ..." because its hard to know if the testing / statistics are accurate.

I have a few websites so I might try this on one of them and see what effect it has on rankings and incoming visors, seems like an interesting concept.

[ThomasHgenhaven]

I think you need to invest time in implementing schema data eventually. When the SERPs you compete in start being filled up with rich snippets, you will have a hard time getting clicks without them.

Some blog posts report a 30 % higher CTR after marking up their snippets with schema / RDF. See for example: http://searchengineland.com/how-to-get-a-30-increase-in-ctr-with-structured-markup-105830

This being said, I really doubt the validity of such posts. It is very hard to measure, and before/after experiments are almost always flawed.

[Mcarle]

In my opinion every little bit helps.

Having a nifty bio photo might not gain you rankings but it WILL gain you clicks, & clicks gain you conversions.

In a very round about way those higher conversions seem to help SERPS.