In Footer Putter version 1.8, I added an option to express your organization contact details using HTML5 Microdata in the Footer Copyright widget. The reason to do this is supposedly better SEO and to add support for local search by providing a precise geographical location for your business. Google recommends use of microdata for your organization details
Microdata Schemas
The microdata in the Footer Copyright widget uses the following schemas:
- http://schema.org/Organization
- http://schema.org/Place
- http://schema.org/PostalAddress
- http://schema.org/GeoCoordinates
The schema has dozens of fields in a hierarchical structure. The ones I choose to populate in the copyright widget are:
Organization -> Location -> Address -> Street Address
Address Locality
Address Region
Address Postal Code
Address Country
Geo -> Latitude
Longitude
Map -> Map URL
-> Telephone
-> Email
Microdata Geo-Coordinates
The latitude and longitude are not visible to human visitors. However, the search engines (and mobile devices) can use this data for local search.
Map URLs And Link Juice In The Footer
When including an URL in the footer then this will go on every page. Where this is an external link to say maps.google.com then it is not a great idea to have the visitor leave your site to view the map. Also from a point of view of SEO it is not good to have the link juice leak off every page on your site to Google Maps.
Instead, create a page on your site called “Find Us”, “Our Location” or something similar. Then embed the Google Map on that page. Add a menu item to the Footer menu with a link the page.
The means that the map link in the footer of each page, points at an internal page and hence keeps the link juice on the web site.
On the page with the map, you should include a sidebar and hence have plenty of internal links (categories, tags, popular posts, etc) with just the single external link on the page, that is the source URL of the iframe that holds the map.
