Improving your SEO with better markup
Most of us probably feel that our SEO skills are pretty decent, but there is always room for improvement.
In a recent article, Chris Pearson gives us the Definitive Guide to Semantic Web Markup for Blogs, where he writes:
You’d think that as a result of open-source development practices, blog architectures would be pretty close to perfection in areas like Web standards and maximum SEO impact. You’d be wrong.
The article points to several areas that can easily be optimized for search engines through the use of semantic markup; most of these pointers could be applied to any site, not just blogs.
The first, and easiest, SEO improvement is to optimize your title tags by structuring them like this: Post Title - Site Name.
The terms that appear earliest in the title tag are the ones that carry most weight with search engines, so you want them to be as keyword-rich as possible.
The name of your site probably isn’t very descriptive of the content on any one specific page, but the title of a post should be very descriptive, and so it makes the most sense to put those terms first in your title tag.
The second biggest SEO improvement you can make is to make strategic use of your heading tags (h1, h2, h3, etc.).
After the title tag, the h1 tag is the next most important in terms of telling search engines about the content of a specific page.
Ideally, each page of your site will have just one h1 tag that, like your title tag, contains keywords that are descriptive of that page’s content.
This is one area that I am willing to bet most sites fail - usually you will see the site name at the top of the page in an h1 tag, with the post title farther down in an h2 or h3 tag.
From an SEO standpoint, this is completely backwards - by doing this, you are telling search engines that your site’s name is the most important element on the page, while the title of your post is the 2nd most important.
The article suggests that your home page should contain the site’s name in an h1 tag, with the titles of your most recent posts in h2 tags, but that individual posts and pages should have the site name contained inside an h2 tag, with the post’s title inside an h1 tag.
The rest of the article contains several additional tips for improving your SEO performance, but I believe these 2 simple changes will give you the most bang for your buck.
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