If you haven’t heard of semantic markup, think of it this way: what if there was a way to make your website easier to search for and more likely to be seen online? The good news is that there is – semantic markup. While it may sound complicated, it’s simply a method of phrasing your HTML so that it emphasises the meaning (hence semantics) rather than the appearance of your content. Highlighting the appearance of your site as a whole doesn’t give search engines the same amount of information and specificity as clearly delineating content, something which then enables users and, importantly, search engines to understand your content better.
Semantic markup highlights the priorities of the content on your site and designing it around the way people and machines will read it. In this way, it derives from common sense: just as it would on a written page, headings are clearly delineated with the tag <h1> or <h2>, just as they would usually be underlined when on paper. Similarly, paragraphs, rather than being indented, are marked with the appropriate tag <p>. This way, HTML tags aren’t chosen due to the way they appear on a browser but on the importance of their content.
Recently, this process has become even more specific, allowing for semantic markup to further increase a site’s search engine optimisation (SEO). Now, there are HTML tags such as <article>, <aside>, or <footer>, among others. Once again, these tags evidently prioritise the structure and content of the site, making it more machine and people friendly to read. Being able to distinguish what type of information is on your page helps search engines prioritise the important content contained within it and promote that content further up search queries.
If you’d like help or advice on how best to implement semantic markup on your site, Corona IT Solutions’ experts and technicians are available to discuss what would be best for your business if you contact us. For more ways of optimising your search engine results, check out our other blog articles.
