I have previously written about the benefits of Web Accessibility being inherently linked with search engine visibility, so I'm going to restrict this article with practical examples of good markup that will do wonders for a site's placement in search engine results.

First things first. The structure and heirarchy of your site needs to be comprehensible to any automated data-mining program, such as a search engine. When search engines read a page, they assign various degrees of relevance and importance to each element of that page, depending on what that element is. Therefore, a good structrual foundation is key to your site being understood, and therefore indexed properly by search engines.

The <title> tag is probably one of the more important elements, as the text contained within it will be displayed in the search results. Therefore the title needs to give a brief, et concise overview of the contents of that page. Titles such as, 'Section 1' are useless - they have no meaning on a list of search results. Section 1 of what? Of a series of articles? If so, then say so. A much better title would be, 'HTML Reference articles - Section 1'.

A lot of people include their domain or website name within the <title> tag. Though this is fine, it should really be placed last. This is more to do with Accessibility rather than good SEO - it's all about how much of the text can be displayed, and it's far more useful to allow the domain name to be cut off rather than a descriptional element.

<title>
Search Engine Optimisation: Page 1 - thedigitalfeed.com
</title>