Use Semantic Coding (Semantic Markup)
September 23rd, 2008 • seo
I believe semantic coding (or semantic markup) is an important issue for search engine optimization that should always be in your mind when you design your web site.
It’s not a big deal, you can view semantic coding as a good programming practice. Like “Don’t use ‘goto’” sentences that you hear from everybody while starting to learn programming. The aim is to use correct tags to be more descriptive about the information contained in a web site. There is always more than one way to render something using HTML, but it’s important to choose the more descriptive markups in order to help search engines understand your content. Here is an example:
“<b>bold text</b>” will produce “some bold text”
“<strong>bold text</strong>” will produce “some bold text”
To print some bold text on your screen you can use the above markups or any other way (defining styles etc.). However there’s something that “strong” tag will say to search engines that others won’t: The text rendered in bold is important. So use strong tags whereever you want bold text.
H (heading) tags are great examples of semantic coding. Normally putting the title of your page between appropriate H tags will inform search engines about important sentences in your content, in other words they will give an idea about the topic of web page. So it’ll be wise to use H1, H2, H3… tags whereever possible. But try to use only one H1 tag per page since search engines expect the heading of the page to be given between H1 tags — and one page normally will have one heading. For sub sections use H2, H3 etc.
Another important semantic markup is ul, li series. When you list some items, use them instead of any other markup.
I think you got the idea. So no need to go over all the tags (I have to go home now :)) So I’ll give you the list. You can go over the list by yourself: h1, h2, h3…, strong, em, ul, li, p, abbr, acronym, cite, code, ol, dfn.
I guess I forgot some 
