Web Development and Technology Blog

A few weeks back, I attended a full-day seminar on Google’s AdWords. AdWords is such an amazing thing, as it so totally changes the paradigm of advertising.  I work for a direct mail and marketing provider (BlueGrass Mailing) and I have always loved direct mail, going back to when I worked in politics, because it is targetable; I can pick a specific market and send a specific message to them. What makes AdWords so amazing is you get the specific target, specific message and then you can track the ability of that message to move people, no other medium offers this.

Anyway, one of the things that really struck me about our discussion of optimizing your site for both organic and paid results, was that the “semantic web” can help you with your search results. The semantic web has always been a esoteric area for me. I understand in theory what Tim Berners-Lee means about separating presentation from data. The easiest example is that I use CSS to format my data, that I store in databases or in HTML as unformatted. But in that case, I know what the data is and what I am doing with it. He is talking more big picture, talking about all the data that we create in terabytes daily and bringing some kind of order to it. So I never really thought it would be relevant to something like Search Engine Optimization, or relevant to me in a smaller way.

What was said about SEO, though , is that if you start using tags like Header Tags (H1 – H6) and Paragraph tags, then the search engines pick up on that and assign a weight the data within those tags.

I had quit using header tags, because I thought it was bad practice. When I first started doing simple web pages, all the way back in 1996 (for Transylvania’s College Republicans) I used header tags, because they were a simple way to format text. Netscape had a default format for each, so you knew what it would look like.  Then as HTML 4.0 and CSS came along and there were better ways to specify your text format, I quit using them.  This semantic way means you use the CSS to format what the data inside the tags looks like, but then you are just using the header and paragraph tags to identify, “hey, this is my most important thing – literally, my page’s header” or “this is just a regular paragraph.”

I am still getting used to using it, as you can see from my own site, but it is definitely something interesting to keep in mind and a simple way to increase your site’s pages’ searchability.