Search Engine Optimization
Search engines place greater emphasis on certain tags within your page, such as <title> and <h1>. This means that pages with the keywords a user is searching for in the title and top level headings will get a bump in the search results vs. pages with the keywords in <p> or other less important tags. For more on SEO benefits of semantic markup, check out this great post on semantic markup for blogs at pearsonified.com.
Accessibility
Semantically marked up pages result in greater accessibility. For example, screen readers can't decipher a top level heading from the rest of your content unless it is surrounded by <h1> tags. This is not to say that using semantic markup will guarantee that your site will be fully accessible, but it's a good start. For more on accessibility, see The W3C Accessibility Initiative website.
Maintainability
Semantic markup is easier to maintain. Sure, you could surround all of your headings with <div> or <span> tags, but then you'd have to specify a class or an ID in order to accurately target them with CSS. If you have all of your top level headings in <h1> tags and all your paragraphs in <p> tags, then when it comes time to style your page, you can just style the elements themselves and you don't have to worry about classes or IDs. Overall, you'll end up with less clutter in your pages and your stylesheets.
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