Comments on: Semantic Markup and Semantic Coding Guidelines for SEO

By: Hamburg Webdesign

Hamburg Webdesign — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 13:57:42 +0000

Hey & thanks for the nice list. Some of those tags are so rarely used that I have never even heard of them, e.g. the “samp”-tag. Oh and while we are talking about semantics, in XHTML all tags have to be spelled in small letter, so “strong” instead of “STRONG”. Using capitals is WRONG.

By: SJL Web Design

SJL Web Design — Tue, 04 Aug 2009 08:58:38 +0000

Great article Barry, I struggle to see why so many people still have trouble writing clean, semantic code. I will share this article with some friends and hopefully it will help them out. Good to see you agree with the one h1 on a page too.

By: Essex website designer

Essex website designer — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 12:58:15 +0000

Instead of explaining semantic markup to clients I now link them to this article
Concise and well written, thanks

By: Rak Logo Design

Rak Logo Design — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 12:30:17 +0000

Great article Barry, semantic coding is so often misunderstood by so many SEO firms, I came across one the other day which has 7 h1 tags on their site.

By: Micah - Vacuum Reviews Blog

Micah - Vacuum Reviews Blog — Sun, 08 Feb 2009 17:51:37 +0000

Thanks for the info. It always stinks when you make a Web 2.0 site that looks wonderful, but sucks at SEO.

By: Dave

Dave — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 22:08:27 +0000

Can one do this in markup?

content text goes here

By: Michael

Michael — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 00:01:27 +0000

Great information to know. I never knew that strong was counted more than the b tag. Great place to start and definitely making a site XHTML compliant can only help with your ranking.

By: Barry Wise

Barry Wise — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 16:35:43 +0000

Jake;
Your site is in HTML 4.01, not XHTML, as you can see in your first declaritive statement.

You have a SEVERE problem with your home page. Your site returns a 200 http status code in the header at http://www.skylanterns2u.com/, but then the page redirects the user to a new URL, http://skylanterns2u.com/home/home.php. This is very bad, use a header code of 301 to do the redirect, not whatever it is you are using (meta refresh or javascript, etc.)

There are some things you can do to improve on-page SEO factors with semantic coding, but first you have to clean up the code. The W3C HTML validator returns 51 errors in the page markup:
http://validator.w3.org/

By: Jake

Jake — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 07:40:24 +0000

Great, informative website. Wondered if anyone could have a look at my website which is in xhtml to see what I can do to improve my rankings. http://www.skylanterns2u.com.

Regards
Jake

By: SEO Best Practices for Coding Your Website

SEO Best Practices for Coding Your Website — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 00:01:44 +0000

[...] are some great semantic coding guidelines, courtesy of Barry [...]