The Design and Content Guidelines section of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines contains a paragraph that says “…. Write pages that accurately and clearly describe your content. This is the only way I know to achieve this goal easily. I will provide additional reading links on semantic markup near the end.
Semantic markup refers to using html elements that correspond to ‘content meaning’ and not ‘content presentation’. An example of semantic markup is being used for emphasis in certain cases, rather than italic. tells the browser what the content means.
Semantic markup and separating content from presentation are not only beneficial for Google but also have other benefits. It is easier to maintain code and it is easier for other user agents, such as audio screen reader software.
Semantic markup isn’t a technical necessity. This is likely why only a small percentage of web designers even understand it, let alone how to use it when creating web pages.
As a web designer, I hate the web designer when I have to make site-wide changes that aren’t semantic (presentational) markup. For example if I want to change list items to uppercase and the designer has coded them as
– List item one – List item two – List item threeThen I must make changes to each page. They could have used
- List item 1
- List item 2
- List item number three
Then I can do the exact same thing with just one line of CSS.ul text transform: uppercase; without having to touch any of its markup.
I want to also shoot the designer whenever there is a missed opportunity for Google to describe content.
You might consider using their Semantic Extraction tool if your web designer has created a W3C-validated site. This will provide a basic overview of some semantics in your HTML markup. It examines your markup, and gives you a summary of the most important data. It simply examines your markup and provides a summary of important data i.e., generic metadata, related resource abbreviations, acronyms, and an outline for the document. This was the output of my previous analysis of the site’s home page.
Generic metadata and other related resources