Google Local Search integration with your forum

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This Google announcement opens up another door for community leaders to share their location based content on the web. Thought this article would be of importance to those that are dedicated to making it easier for users to stumble upon your site through this search engine.

Today, we’re announcing that your use of Rich Snippets can help people find the web pages you’ve created that may reference a specific place or location. By using structured HTML formats like hCard to markup the business or organization described on your page, you make it easier for search engines like Google to properly classify your site, recognize and understand that its content is about a particular place, and make it discoverable to users on Place pages.

Source: http://www.google.com/newproducts/

To display Rich Snippets, Google looks for markup formats (microformats and RDFa) that you can easily add to your own web pages. In most cases, it's as quick as wrapping the existing data on your web pages with some additional tags. For example, here are a few relevant lines of the HTML from Yelp's review page for "Drooling Dog BarBQ" before adding markup data:

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and now with microformats markup:

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or alternatively, use RDFa markup. Either format works:

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By incorporating standard annotations in your pages, you not only make your structured data available for Google's search results, but also for any service or tool that supports the same standard. As structured data becomes more widespread on the web, we expect to find many new applications for it, and we're excited about the possibilities.

Source: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/05/introducing-rich-snippets.html