Structure Content
HTML was designed to be flexible and easy to use. Which means that many people could build pages quickly. Which means that pages often are built in haphazard ways. And because browsers tend to be forgiving, all these webmasters are lulled into believing their sloppy pages are just great.
If a page is not well-structured, however, search engines may have trouble reading the document. With well-structured pages, search engines can access the content more easily, analyze the content more accurately, and index the page more usefully. Look at the following two samples:
<html>
<head>
<title>Jellyfish Classification</title>
</head>
<body>
<p><b>Jellyfish Classification</b></p>
<p>Jellyfish (also called jellies or sea jellies as they are not true fish) are animals that belong to Phylum Cnidaria, included in the class Scyphozoa.</p>
</body>
</html>
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<html>
<head>
<title>Jellyfish Classification</title>
</head>
<body>
<h1>Jellyfish Classification</h1>
<p>Jellyfish (also called jellies or sea jellies as they are not true fish) are animals that belong to Phylum Cnidaria, included in the class Scyphozoa.</p>
</body>
</html>
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When a search engine comes across a page that is well-structured, the engine will treat text found in <h1> through <h1> tags differently than text in <h6> tags. The heading text gets a little more weight. If you search for "jellyfish classification," the example above on the right will appear higher in the search results. The main tags used to identify a page's structure are heading and paragraph tags.
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