Headers are importnat, but I feel they should always be mixed with good CSS coding to ensure good looks with good SEO.

Not only is semantic markup useful, it just helps make the code make sense. Hopefully more designers will pick up on this and start using it more often.

Oh, and thanks for linking to my list, keep up the good work!

Gonna take a gander at those articles and definitely keep this in mind next time I am coding a site.

As for the meta descriptions, I would actually keep using them. Even though Google may choose to ignore them from time to time, without them, you run the risk of a search engine grabbing the completely wrong bit of text to auto insert.

It is similar to what you said about the semantic naming – it is a good habit to get into on an ongoing future basis, but if you have hundreds of past pages to tag, it may not be worth the time.

The aim is to keep your markup flexible by describing the content regardless of how the site may look. Think about the HTML as if there was no such thing as presentational style, how would you name each element in a way that makes sense?

As you can probably guess on complex or low cost sites this can become time consuming and complex, so I’d keep it as something to think about for future sites and implement as and where you can.

Andy Clarke of http://www.stuffandnonsense.co.uk/ and http://forabeautifulweb.com/ has spoken and written about semantic markup and labeling (probably not the right term, identifying maybe?) in the past. You may like to check out his book http://transcendingcss.com/ he’s very much into semantic markup.

I completely support what you’re saying in the article though… and I seem to have missed out bits of your article on my first read through (while at work which may explain it), so sorry if my commented came across as a bit odd.

I’m interested in what you say about not requiring a meta description, I’ve always included one and never really thought about whether it’s really used by search engines. I think I’ll leave it off my next site and see how things go in Google.

Out of curiosity, are there practical advantages to semantic naming vs presentational? My natural instinct would be to lean toward presentational to help with coding and updating and all that…

Some examples: #content_box, #left_box, #side_wrapper, #side_top… box, left, side, top are all presentational references and don’t relate to the content they are associated with. You should aim for semantic naming such as #secondary_content, #contact_details, #adverts etc that describe their contents rather than the presentation.