<p> tags and their effect on SEO

[Nutter]

Does wrapping text in <p></p> tags seem to have any effect of how well a page is indexed? I'm working on a new forum and trying to do whatever I can to make it as friendly to search engines as possible, which I've realized is somewhat an uphill battle with forums. One thing I've noticed is that nothing is wrapped in paragraph tags (or header tags although I've worked on that a little) and it seems that the body of posts should be.

So before I start editing the theme so that the posts are wrapped in paragraph tags, does anyone know if this would be beneficial? I'm thinking it's not going to make it worse so it can't hurt to try but want to get opinions of anyone who might have gone down this road before.

[tedster]

A few years back I saw some extensive data that strongly implied Google scored information inside true <p> elements stronger than text that was just "lying loose" in a table cell or whatever. Google has certainly evolved since them, so I can't say it's true now - espeically not with the hundreds of things Google measures (and the other majors, for that matter.)

It still makes good sense to put your text in semantically meaningful containers - paragraphs, heading tags, lists, blockquotes and so on. That way you are giving a clearer signal for the algorithms to tune in to.

After all, the M in HTML stands for mark-up. The original concept was that you BEGIN with some document, and then ADD mark-up. You are tagging the various parts of a document to tell user agents what kind of thing each bit is.

In my experience, documents that are well tagged from a semantic point of view tend to do better in search results.

[ronin]

Pure speculation on my part, but I would guess that marking up paragraphs as paragraphs is some kind of signal of quality. (Or, at any rate, a signal of higher quality than not doing so).

[ogletree]

I try to set up my pages with just html and do any kind of style using CSS.