tags, it’s much easier for an AI agent to misunderstand what actions it should perform.
When you use semantic HTML for things like buttons, links, and forms, the chances of an AI agent failing its task are much lower.
The meaning inherent in proper HTML tags will tell the AI agent where to go and what to do.
What About Structured Data?
You may think that structured data has made semantic HTML obsolete.
After all, with structured data, you can provide machine systems with the necessary information about a page’s content and purpose in a simple machine-readable format.
This is true to an extent. However, structured data was never intended to replace semantic HTML. It serves an entirely different purpose.
Structured data has limitations that semantic HTML doesn’t have.
Structured data won’t tell a machine which button adds a product to a cart, what subheading precedes a critical paragraph of text, and which links the reader should click on for more information.
By all means, use structured data to enrich your pages and help machines understand your content. But you should also use semantic HTML for the same reasons.
Used together, semantic HTML and structured data are an unbeatable combination.
Build Websites, Not Web Apps
I could go off on a 2,500-word rant about why we should be building websites instead of web apps and how the appification of the web is anathema to the principles on which the World Wide Web was founded, but I’ll spare you that particular polemic.
Suffice it to say that web apps for content-delivery websites (like news sites) are almost always inferior to plain old-fashioned websites.
And websites are built, or should be, on HTML. Make use of all that HTML has to offer, and you’re avoiding 90% of the technical SEO pitfalls that web apps tend to faceplant themselves into.
That’s it for another edition. Thanks for reading and subscribing, and I’ll see you at the next one!
This post was originally published on SEO For Google News.
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