Semantics aside, the other thrust of good markup implied that it will garner you with better SERP placement. Outside of the fact that it is 'Google recommended', there is no tangible proof that properly marked up pages will gain you more advantage. Having said that however, I am not one to tempt fate and we all must strive to eek out every bit of edge we can.
Blog Comments & Trackbacks
Blogs are strange animals by nature and really do not conform to an atypical 'content' page. In fact, they are very similar to Forum sites. Start your post off with a strong title and 250 words of keyword rich content around that title, then hope for the best. By the time you get 30, 40 to a kazillion or more comments following your post, then it pretty much gets watered down in the process.
Blog comments are a necessary evil. On one hand, they will make the spider go crazy if the blog is busy with them. Nothing like a post that is constantly growing with comments. On the other hand, the quality of comments can degrade the post and dilute it with tons of 'good post, mate' and 'this helped a bunch, dude' types of entries.
Outbound links from comments can be more degrading than the comment itself. It is rare that those links go to a like-minded site, or have anything to do with the original post.
Trackback linking is very good to have. It is what makes the blog an almighty spider delight.
I would delegate each of these to their own DIV with one heading tag at the top of each. H2 or H3 for the trackbacks, and comments lower down the chain with an H4 or H5 even.
I noticed that Chris was surrounding the outbound comment links with their own H3 elements, this is not right in my opionion. Too much emphasis is being put on non-supportive no-follow link and the commentors name.
I question whether individual comments are worthy of a heading element in the first place. A more elegant solution would be the use of a definition list as per this W3C Recommendation:
Another application of DL, for example, is for marking up dialogues, with each DT naming a speaker, and each DD containing his or her words.
My View on Sidebar Markup
Chris was spot on about proper usage of <title> and <h1> elements, and even using sub-elemental <h2> or <h3> within the posts. The use of them in the sidebar, however, may be open for interpretation and requires a little more thought.
I am (currently) using one <h3> element and short description at the top of my sidebar. The areas for Latest Posts, Syndication, Archives, and Powered By are all served up within their own definition lists (DL). My slant on this, right or wrong, is that they are all groups of lists and as such, each list needs a definition.
In Conclusion
Strong TITLE and H1 are key. Add in an H2 or two within your post as needed. Delegate one heading element H3 or lower to each section, listed in order of importance: Trackbacks, Sidebar, then Comments.
Trackbacks, Latest Posts, Blogrolls, Syndication, etc are all lists and should be treated as such. I chose to use DL to contain mine. I don't think it really matters if you use UL instead, this is just my preference and doing so eliminates the use of more Heading elements to define them.
Comments, per the W3C, qualify as a Definition List (DL). In my opinion, I think this is a little quirky and I will have to give this a little more thought. Any opinions would be greatly appreciated.
No comments:
Post a Comment