Benefits to using semantic HTML in post content?

I've been reading up on semantic HTML as a means of improving accessibility and SEO, but I'm still learning about the implications of semantic HTML.

One question I have is whether there's any point to making sure that semantic HTML is used as much as possible in post content.

Example: I have a post type for research projects. The write-up for a single research project can have any number of abbreviations for academic credentials, prefixes and suffixes (e.g., Mr., Sr., or Jr.), diseases, organizations, technology (e.g., MRI), etc. It may also have references to other dates, such as when a past study was done. It will certainly have a date for when the research project was published on the website.

Here are a few examples that have made me wonder about using semantic HTML in the past:

  • A date range, like 2020 - 2022
  • The presentation of ordinal numbers such as 1st, 2nd, 3rd,...
  • Repeated abbreviations, such as referring to someone as always Dr. Brown.

In such a case, should I be stickler about making sure that all abbreviations are wrapped in abbr tags, all dates in time tags, date ranges are spelled out (e.g., time datetime=20202020/time to time datetime=20222022/time, not 2020 - 2022), ordinal numbers are spelled out or they also use abbr tags, etc.?

Topic accessibility seo html content posts Wordpress

Category Web

1
answered at

It's a little hard to answer this question definitively, but typically, adding semantic markup can benefit SEO (because robots understand what they're parsing better) and can benefit end users (because their various technologies, which could include screen readers among many others, also understand what they're parsing better).

Search engines and screen readers also often present things back to users in more easily scannable formats - for example, using a real <ul> instead of pasted bullet characters enables screen reader users to hear "List with 17 items" instead of just "Bullet text of list item one."

If Google is the primary search engine you're interested in affecting, you can use their various tools - one of which is the Schema Testing Tool - to determine what structured and semantic data may be of use for your site and may enable Google to display richer search results, which can increase clickthrough rates.

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