{"id":529,"date":"2010-03-04T12:00:42","date_gmt":"2010-03-04T16:00:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.blizzarddigital.com\/blog\/?p=529"},"modified":"2010-04-20T15:13:03","modified_gmt":"2010-04-20T19:13:03","slug":"semantic-markup","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.blizzarddigital.com\/blog\/semantic-markup\/","title":{"rendered":"Semantic Markup &#8211; Why Should You Use It?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Your markup should have meaning. Markup your content appropriately (e.g. put your address and phone number in the <code>address<\/code> element) and it becomes much more readable to search engines and other software used for data extraction. Using only <code>div<\/code> and <code>span<\/code> elements leaves much to be desired, semantically speaking. These elements are certainly indispensable, however, there are some cases where there are more meaningful elements to use. For example:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Use <code>h1<\/code> as your page title; use <code>h2<\/code> and on appropriately as sub-headings on the page. This provides an outline of your document.<\/li>\n<li>Use lists (<code>dl<\/code>, <code>ol<\/code>, <code>ul<\/code>) instead of manually placing numbers or bullets.<\/li>\n<li>Use <code>address<\/code> for any contact information on your page, including physical address, email address, phone numbers, and whatever else you would consider to be contact info.<\/li>\n<li>Use <code>table<\/code> on data best represented in rows and columns. Use <code>thead<\/code> and <code>th<\/code> to markup the column headings and <code>tbody<\/code> for the data itself.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Check the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.w3.org\/TR\/html401\/struct\/text.html\">HTML spec<\/a> for additional meaningful elements and get to work! \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n<p>You can use the W3&#8217;s handy <a href=\"http:\/\/www.w3.org\/2003\/12\/semantic-extractor.html\">Semantic Data Extractor<\/a> tool to test your new semantic web site to give you an idea of how it would be seen by software.<\/p>\n<p>That does it for now. See you next time! Until then, read <a href=\"http:\/\/www.blizzarddigital.com\/blog\/seo-and-validation\/\">SEO and Validation<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Why should you use semantic markup when designing your website pages?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[155,153,154,61,183,19],"class_list":["post-529","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-web-standards","tag-data-extraction","tag-semantic-markup","tag-semantics","tag-tips","tag-web-standards","tag-xhtml"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.blizzarddigital.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/529","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.blizzarddigital.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.blizzarddigital.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.blizzarddigital.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.blizzarddigital.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=529"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/www.blizzarddigital.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/529\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":685,"href":"https:\/\/www.blizzarddigital.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/529\/revisions\/685"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.blizzarddigital.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=529"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.blizzarddigital.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=529"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.blizzarddigital.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=529"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}