What is the semantic markup and how to optimize it?
The pages of your website are made of HTML tags. These tags frame your whole content as follows:
<tag>text paragraph</tag>
There are different types of tags which most often generate a specific display. Usually, each tag has been developed for a specific purpose. Hn type tags are then useful to enhance titles and subtitles (H1, H2…).
However, we notice that the implementation of these tags is not always consistent in strict compliance with the definitions proposed by the HTML language standard-setter: the W3C.
Search engines use and analyse the HTML tags in order to understand better the topic of a web page. The final goal, for the search engines, is to make their results pages more and more relevant so they can suit the users queries.
Their algorithms seem more and more based on the official HTML specifications. Thats is why it is better to display a markup in accordance with these specifications.
Let's take an example:
The H1 tag is defined as the most important title of a page.
It will therefore be recommended for a product description on a e-commerce to frame the label of this product by a H1 tag. Ideally, the title of an article will be framed by this tag in the same way.
It is possible to follow the same reasoning for your whole content. For an unordered list of elements? Use the tag UL LI. For a long quote from an author? A blockquote tag, etc.
