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Have you heard that WordPress gives 85% SEO, right out of the box? Do you believe that?

It’s true.

And it’s partly because of plain old semantic HTML, commonly referred to as “POSH.” POSH is a really easy concept to understand, if you know even a little bit about HTML.

The basic idea driving POSH is that the header and other structural elements should be used to support the document semantically, not just visually. Thus, the main idea – headline or title – should be encoded in the most important elements of the web page such as <title> elements or <h1>. Less important ideas, phrases or keywords are expressed in less important elements, such as <h2>, <h3>, or <h4>.

Here’s where WordPress is brilliant:

WordPress displays <title> elements and <h1> elements on web pages according to context.

Remember, a web page is something the browser displays on your computer screen. A WordPress Post is a special type of web page delivered by WordPress. (I’m going to start capitalizing “Post” and “Page” to indicate context.)

The simple rule WordPress is demonstrating in both cases is one <title> and one <h1> element on each web page. Let’s see this rule in action for two cases using WordPress Posts:

1. Front web page with a list of Posts
2. Single post web page

Front page structure

The front page of a WordPress blog usually lists several recent posts. A POSH-compliant theme such as Thesis will structure the front page accordingly. Let’s take a look at the page structure information using the source code view of the front page:

• <title> By default, the name you choose for your web site. For example, “Website In A Wekeend.”
• <h1> By default, your tagline; on Website In A Weekend it’s “Web Zero to Web Hero.”
• <h2> Title of latest post. For October 26, 2009, that’s “WordPress Architecture – The Building Blocks of Web Publishing“
• <h2> Title of 2d latest post: “WordPress Plugins, Google Wave — There’s a busy month ahead!“
• <h2> &c.

Single post page

• <title> WordPress Architecture – The Building Blocks of Web Publishing | Website In A Weekend. Note the suffix append after the vertical bar “|” is handled by (in this case) by All In One SEO. Your theme may have similar capability.
• <h1> “WordPress Architecture – The Building Blocks of Web Publishing.” This is the same as the <title> element, but it doesn’t have to be! There’s some evidence for better keyword coverage – thus better traffic – using a slightly different title for the web page than for the article.
• <h2> Subsections within article: Programming language background
• <h2> Basic WordPress, or WordPress straight out of the box
• <h2> &c.

There you have it: one <title> and one <h1> for each web page, value depending how the web page is displayed.

I can hear you now: “Why does all this matter?”

It matters because WordPress gets POSH right, and that’s about 85% of your SEO effort according to Matt Cutts of Google.

POSH – Required reading

The canonical reference for POSH has to be the microformats.org POSH wiki entry. Everything on microformats.org is worth reading carefully. Semantic web technology is coming. Be ahead of the power curve.

From POSH – Plain Old Semantic HTML: Here’s the meta description (what you know as “SEO Description”):

Teach people how to use plain old semantic HTML to create valid, well-structured, accessible and interoperable websites.

The comments on the article are very good, consider taking a few minutes to read them carefully.

No list of references on semantic HTML would be complete without the Wikipedia entry. This Wikipedia entry is a little weak, but there you have it.

Here’s a whole blog devoted to Plain Old Semantic HTML. There’s a lot of really good information on this blog, most of dated a couple of years back, but still valid.

Going the extra mile…

I could make a 5 minute screencast on this topic. It would take about an hour (I’ll have to script it to get it under 5 minutes). Is it worth it? Who wants it? Here’s what I’ll do: if I get 5 comments with “Make a screencast!” or similar, I’ll fire up my microphone and Behringer mixing board and make a really short screencast showing exactly what this is all about.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pQAIa9b3-_Y[/youtube]