Discuss the articles posted on Dev.Opera.
By jdevalk
Thursday, 25. October 2007, 18:48:09
Semantic HTML and Search Engine Optimization
Following on from his last article on optimizing your site structure to improve SEO,
Joost de Valk now turns his attention to improving SEO further through the use of good
semantic HTML.
( Read the article )
By mmaranon5
Saturday, 18. October 2008, 05:06:28

When I have long articles I have to divide them in subpages, adding a numeric navigation bar for all the pages.
I have a semantic conflict: If the significative unit is the page (and not the bunch of them which form the article), it is weird to tag as h3 an epigraph tagged as h2 in the previous page.
What I do is recreate in each page the global structure: h1 with the title of the article, h2 with the title of the sub-epigraph, and the texto with the corresponding h3 headers. This way I preserve the unit of the article while situating each part in the apropriate context, keeping at time the singularity of all pages. (stetically it is not very nice, but I can make disappear the empty h in the presentation layer with a class styled as display:none;).
Would this be a 'good practice' in your opinion?
Thanks for the article an your comments.
By daneastwell
Friday, 9. January 2009, 17:00:33

"search engines cannot read the text in your images." True, but can they read the alt text? And how much weight is it given, compared to normal text, and 'Image replaced' text?
By chrismills
Sunday, 11. January 2009, 20:19:51

Originally posted by daneastwell:
"search engines cannot read the text in your images." True, but can they read the alt text? And how much weight is it given, compared to normal text, and 'Image replaced' text?
Yes, search engines do read the alt attribute contents of your images. As to how much weight is given compared to other types of text on the page...I'm not sure about that; it's a good question!
I'll have to track down an SEO expert to ask.
Thanks for your comments.