Semantic Meaning of Html Tags
The most obvious way to optimize Web content is to look at the tags with textual content including elements such as the title, headings, Alt tags, links, paragraph, Span and Div. However, there are more aspects of content optimization and that includes the usage of the tags themselves.
A common way to emphasize text is to make it bold using the "<b></b>" tag. Another way is to use the "<strong></strong>" tag which shows the text as bold and has a semantic meaning in addition that says this piece of text is more important than the surrounding text. A popular way to show code snippets on a Web page is to place it inside the "<pre></pre>" tag, but even a better semantic alternative is to place it inside a "<code></code>" tag.
The tables below show data on the usage of some Html tags that have semantic meaning incuding the previously mentioned tags.
| Html Tags: General Web Sites | |||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Observed Element | % Found | Average | Min | Max | Median | 80 Percentile Range | |
| strong | 53.11 | 12.10 | 1.00 | 191.00 | 11.83 | 1.00 - 28.65 | |
| small | 6.42 | 8.08 | 1.00 | 177.00 | 4.33 | 1.50 - 17.30 | |
| code | .83 | 15.15 | .00 | 76.00 | 15.00 | 14.50 - 15.83 | |
| pre | .60 | 3.96 | .00 | 14.00 | 4.33 | 3.50 - 5.17 | |
| blockquote | 10.74 | 3.10 | 1.00 | 52.00 | 1.67 | 1.00 - 6.75 | |
| address | .54 | 1.12 | .00 | 7.00 | 1.00 | .67 - 1.67 | |
| cite | 2.96 | 4.95 | .00 | 71.00 | 2.67 | .83 - 20.63 | |
| fieldset | 6.66 | 1.82 | 1.00 | 14.00 | 1.50 | 1.00 - 5.13 | |
| label | 19.49 | 4.97 | 1.00 | 120.00 | 4.33 | 1.10 - 11.50 | |
| legend | 2.88 | 1.74 | 1.00 | 11.00 | 1.00 | 1.00 - 4.35 | |
| Html Tags: Web Sites in Favorable SE Position | |||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Observed Element | % Found | Average | Min | Max | Median | 80 Percentile Range | |
| strong | 50.89 | 9.32 | 1.00 | 142.00 | 9.29 | 1.00 - 21.73 | |
| small | 4.46 | 7.05 | 1.00 | 66.00 | 3.29 | 1.00 - 18.57 | |
| code | .14 | .14 | .00 | 1.00 | .14 | .14 - .14 | |
| pre | .41 | 2.00 | .00 | 7.00 | 2.00 | 2.00 - 2.00 | |
| blockquote | 5.26 | 2.30 | .00 | 35.00 | 3.71 | .86 - 7.66 | |
| address | 1.36 | .76 | .00 | 2.00 | .71 | .71 - .86 | |
| cite | 1.09 | 2.00 | .00 | 6.00 | 2.00 | 1.86 - 2.14 | |
| fieldset | 5.95 | 2.31 | 1.00 | 14.00 | 3.00 | 1.00 - 6.29 | |
| label | 19.70 | 4.77 | 1.00 | 49.00 | 8.00 | 1.00 - 12.56 | |
| legend | 1.75 | 1.33 | .00 | 5.00 | 1.43 | 1.00 - 1.71 | |
Both samples show very similar usage results and clearly, there is a lot of room for semantic improvements in Html code.
