HTML tags have meaning, semantic markup just means "adding meaning to your content with tags." For example, instead of formatting a headline with the <b> tag to make it bold, use a heading tag like <h2>, typically browsers and search engines can recognize headings <h1> through <h6>, and usually they expect them to appear in a logical order. Well you could look at the code of this article, and see that the first <H> tag I use is an <h2> and then I use a few <h3> tags and then go back to <h2> for my next major heading. What I'm doing here is telling a search engine "Hey! The stuff between these tags is important, give it more weight in searching." Web browsers will display each heading level differently, and since our site (and many)uses CSS, additional styling can be applied to further distinguish them which makes the content easier for a human to understand. Similarly, instead of using numbers or asterisks for lists, use and <ol> (ordered list, or numbered list) or <ul> (unordered or bulleted list) tags plus an <li>