: How to mark up a poem in HTML for SEO I'm building poetry web site and I wanted some HTML structure tips for entries. Example: <h1>This is poetry title</h1> <p> Poem's

@Ann8826881

In most cases, p and br is the way to go. Instead of p+br you could also use the pre element, especially if the poem contains meaningful/unusual whitespace. See my answer on Stack Overflow for examples and more details.

Some background: Someone proposed a Microformat for poems (never took off). For HTML5, a poetry element was proposed (and rejected). In the W3C wiki, there is a discussion about markup for poetic content. In 2007, there was a mailing list thread 'HTML 5' and some poem markup?.

For semantic annotations, you could use RDFa and/or Microdata. If you want to use the schema.org vocabulary, schema.org/CreativeWork would be suitable (as described by John Conde).

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@Eichhorn148

The structure of your markup usually has no impact on search engines. For example, Google has said that they don't even care whether or not your markup "validates", as long as it doesn't look broken to users:

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@Pope3001725

Your basic HTML structure is fine. You could use microdata for additional semantic markup.Creative Work is probably the best fit. You can use name, author, and genre.

<div itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/CreativeWork">
<h1 itemprop="name">This is poetry title</h1>
<p itemprop="author">
George PHP
</p>
<p itemprop="genre">
Poem
</p>
<p>
Poem's line 1. <br />
Poem's line 2. <br />
Poem's line 3. <br />
Poem's line 4. <br />
</p>
<p>
Poem's line 5. <br />
Poem's line 6. <br />
Poem's line 7. <br />
Poem's line 8. <br />
</p>
</div>

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