<p>August 18, 2009 by Author Name</p>
<h1>Title of the Post</h1>
<p>Post body goes here.</p>

is semantically worse than moving credits after the title:

<h1>Title of the Post</h1>
<p>August 18, 2009 by Author Name</p>
<p>Post body goes here.</p>

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Suggestion

Currently tweets have the following HTML structure:

<li id="status_ID" class="hentry status u-username">
<span class="status-body">
	<span class="entry-content">Here goes the tweet with an awesome link to an awesome website</span>
	<span class="meta entry-meta">
		<a class="entry-date" rel="bookmark" href="http://domain/username/status/ID">
			<span class="published">about 16 hours ago</span>
		</a>
		<span>from <a href="http://twittertool.url">twittertool</a></span>
	</span>
</span>
</li>

and now the semantic way:

<blockquote id="status_ID" class="u-username" cite="http://domain/username/status/ID">
	<p>Here goes the tweet with an awesome link to an awesome website</p>
	<cite><a rel="bookmark" href="http://domain/username/status/ID">2012.01.01 13:45</a></cite>
	<span>from <a href="http://twittertool.url">twittertool</a></span>
</blockquote>

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Every page on the web can be viewed as a single document. Hypertext enables linking and organizing them into groups and sets, which requires that each document has a clear purpose and structure.

Domain names are unique identifiers of those different groups of documents and are the broadest description of their content. Therefore usually they already include the name of a business, person or product (I will refer to them as ‘logos’).

Overall there are three definite ways to describe the unique content of each page:

1. URL of a document,
2. <title> tag in the header of a document, and
3. <h1> tag as a part of a document.

Usually both URL and <title> tag already contain the name of a logo, therefore it is unnecessary to include it in every page as the most general description of that particular document.

Good example would be a news site, such as news.bbc.co.uk which already has the logo and the most important keyword ‘news’ included in the URL. Although ‘news’ is a subdomain of bbc.co.uk, it clearly describes the content that can be expected.

The <title> tag should be more descriptive of the kind of ‘news’ this website is to offer. Currently news.bbc.co.uk uses ‘News Front Page’ which could be definitely improved to better describe the content of the ‘Front Page’.

For blogs and business websites the <title> tag should include a name and a slogan or a short description of the organization or person. Front page is the only place where the logo could be marked-up using <h1> tag because it is the entrance, the starting point of a website.

According to The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C):

A heading element briefly describes the topic of the section it introduces. There are six levels of headings in HTML with H1 as the most important and H6 as the least.

Every section, however, is a specific part of a website with a clear purpose and message which deserves to have a separate and descriptive title. Logo should be included at the end of a <title> tag content together with the main heading of a particular section, which also has to be a part of URL in a human readable form (not something like id=123).

Title of a book repeated before every section of a book seems unreasonable to most of us. And the web is just like a book, but with links instead of page numbers.

Suggested Reading

• W3C Tips for Webmasters, Use <h1> for top-level heading
• Andy Budd, Quick Quiz: H1′s and Logos
• Dan Cederholm, SimpleQuiz › Site and Page Titles › Conclusion
• Chris Pearson, The Definitive Guide to Semantic Web Markup for Blogs

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Who uses their services? Those who initially hired a bad web design company to build their website. You may wonder which are those bad agencies, that make bad websites and don’t know how to put your site high in the search results. But you may also wonder, why not a single agency advertises itself as we don’t know how to design proper websites but can do one for you company.

There are certain standards and good practices for building websites, and many designers don’t know about them. It is to say that not everything is the same that looks equal on the web. There might be two pages that look exactly the same to you in a web browser, but one is designed by the standards, while the other is not. They both can make a complete sense to you, but the search engines will prefer the first one over the other. Similarly, two cars that look the same, might be in fact different, if you know how to open the hood to discover the different engines they have.

Content vs. the rest

However, content is always the king on the web. If the website has a great content that people find unique, and are willing to link to from other sites, it will definitely rank high in the search results. The popularity and uniqueness of the content are the most important measures of the website’s quality. In such cases, search engines might even forgive you for not conforming to coding standards.

The technical performance, in essence, can’t enhance the quality and relevance of the content, but it can help search engines to appreciate it. For example, in a news site — instead of making the title of an article visually larger and bolder, you can actually tell the search engines, that it is the heading of an article (by using appropriate HTML code). And the algorithms that work beneath search engines will appreciate it and reward you for doing so.

Even the fragment of a text in the previous paragraph (set in bold) is emphasized technically, not only visually. The ability to link and describe the meaning of the content or mark it up in a special way, are the very basics of the hypertext and the web.

Essentially, search engine rankings boil down to the balance between:

• quality and popularity of the content,
• organization of the content, and
• technical representation of the content.

Understanding and improving

Thus, before looking for a search engine optimization expert, you might consider the following:

• Should the websites be optimized for search engines or people?
• Maybe a professional writer could improve the content (product descriptions, about us section, slogans, etc.) and make it more interesting and unique.
• Standards aware web designer could make the code describe website’s content.
• And probably the usability expert could improve the navigation and organization of the content.

It is understandable that a lot of website owners and editors don’t know the reasons their website is not showing up in search results as desired. The truth is, all they probably need is a better copy. Spending few hours to improve it or asking a professional writer to do it might be the best solution. You, as an insider of your industry may actually know more about the phrases and keywords that people would use to search for your services. Think of them and include them into the navigation, headings and product descriptions on your website.

Search engine optimization is not a rocket science. It is all about people like you and me googling for things that interest us.

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