SEO Tycoon

**ForrestCroce** · 10-29-2007, 04:32 AM

Does anybody have any thoughts on whether or how the quality and 'semanticness' of a page affects the way search bots see it? Obviously if the markup is bad enough, or encoded in jscript, they won't be able to read your page. At the other extreme, there's an accessibility search.

A change to my blog prompted this question: the sidebar was marked up with uls, lis, and h2s. This was for markup; to get indentation and big, bold text. So I changed this to spans and CSS. Headings tell a search engine what a page, or at least parts of it, is about. An h2 that says archives and another that reads meta don't put the emphasis where I want it; they arguably don't add value to the document overall.

Since this is the SEO forum, can other tags, like definition lists, ordered or unordered lists, citations, code blocks, and others help a page draw more targeted traffic? Sometimes it makes sense to mark things up this way ignoring the search engines, sometimes it's not worth the effort. For example, I'm hoping to pull in a little more search traffic on keywords I have in heading tags, now that I've got rid of the useless ones. That's just a gut feeling, though.

**gringo** · 05:16 AM

My theory is that when markup is used appropriately, the search engines will interpret the emphasis that you intend. Why would you use a list? To give a concise summary of points, to give a compact sequence of steps etc. To the reader (and therefore search engines?) you have given a certain emphasis to the text in your list.

I think it might be the same with other tags like citations etc. If you believe that search engines are simply trying to extract the meaning assigned by the author, then using tags appropriately will give emphasis naturally to the text that you want to stress.

In my opinion, if you mark up your content in a way that makes structural sense then the SE's will do their job.

EDIT: Just been thinking about your <h2>Archives</h2> that doesn't add stress where you want it. That's a tough one isn't it, because you could argue that the archive links on your page is actually a significant area for your visitors and so should be marked up with some importance. But of course you don't want to give any weight to that 'keyword'. To me it makes structural sense to use some kind of heading so in the context of the document as a whole (in the eyes of the user) maybe a lower level heading, would be better....?

**Learning Newbie** · 10-29-2007, 02:24 PM

The last <p />

in Gringo's reply is really interesting. I was going to ask what you guys are talking about, because giving emphasis here implies taking it away there, and why would anyone want to remove emphasis from some of their keywords?

But then I realized, none of us probably wants to rank for "archives" because, well, someone searching for that probably wants the Library of Congress or National Archives, or, you know, something more important than what I got.

**ForrestCroce** · 10-31-2007, 03:01 AM

Right. That, and if everything is a heading, then really nothing is. The whole idea of h1 and h2 tags is that some text on the page truly is more important than the rest. If it's all the same you can't make that comparison.

To Gringo: I had the same thought. It really does make sense that a list of tags should have a heading denoting what's below, especially since that's the biggest thing on the sidebar. But if you look at the site as a whole instead of page by page, the whole sidebar is repeated everywhere, so ultimately I don't think headings make sense here...?

**gringo** · 10-31-2007, 05:34 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by ForrestCroce

But if you look at the site as a whole instead of page by page, the whole sidebar is repeated everywhere, so ultimately I don't think headings make sense here...?

I don't think you need to look at relative weights of <h2>s on all the pages of your site to check whether you've got the level right. I'm no semantic expert but I think you only need to consider the context of the document.

Imagine if you did determine what level of heading to use by looking at all the headings on your site and assessing their relative importance. You might end up having to use a <h2.314> on one page and a <h2.315> on another, I guess.