John karner
03-10-2011, 08:01 AM
Important HTML Tags for SEO
When beginning a search engine optimisation campaign it’s important to lay the foundations, otherwise its more than likely that you will find yourself fighting a loosing battle from day one.
On page SEO doesn’t need to be difficult or too time consuming, so here are some of the most important html tags for you to consider and to implement throughout your website.
The Title Tag
<head>
<title>Keyword</title>
</head>
A concise, keyword orientated title is one of the best ways to improve the rankings for pages in your site, and to grab visitors attention who may be presented with your site as part of Google’s search results.
In terms of length, the optimal character length (including spaces) is 68 as this is the number of characters Google will display in its SERPs.
It is important to create unique title tags that are relevant to your content for each page on your website, as it is one of the primary sources of information for spiders or robots crawling your site.
H1,H2 and H3
<h1>Most Important</h1>
<h2>Second Most</h2>
<h3>Third Most</h3>
<h4>Forth Most</h4>
<h5>Fifth Most</h5>
<h6>Sixth Most</h6>
By definition, the <h> tags are used to define headings in html. The first <h1> is the most important, and should always be used for the title of the page. The following tags <h2> to <h6> should then be used to define sub headings, or sections on a page in order of importance. Usually web pages won’t go beyond the <h3> tags as they will instead feature multiple <h2> tags, providing that the sub headings are of equal importance. The heading tags are a key aspect of telling a search engine what your page is about, so don’t use them simply for design purposes – a mistake that many web designers are guilty of doing.
Bold or Strong
<b>Keyword</b>
<strong>Keyword</strong>
The Bold and Strong tags should be used to enhance your visitors experience and to help emphasise the more important keywords on your webpage to the search engines. Realistically you should only be adding these tags once per keyphrase on your page and don’t over do it. In times gone by it was touted that inserting a specific amount of these tags would help you reach an optimum “keyword density”, but those theories have largely been dispelled by Google.
Image (XHTML)
<img src =”picture.jpg” alt=”keyword” />
Images make web pages look nice, and are in many cases, what users are searching for. First of all, to tell search engines what your image is, you need to include the “alt” section of the code. As well as this, in order to enhance your chances of gaining a good ranking in Image searches, your images’ keywords should be placed on the webpage, and in an ideal world, close to the image itself.
The alt description of the image is also necessary to comply with accessibility standards for people accessing the Web with devices other than a standard browser, such as screen reading software.
Hyperlink
< a href =”http : // www . exampledomain . com” title =” keyword”> Anchor Text Keyword </a>
Hyperlinks are a key element of what makes the world wide web what it is. Without these on web pages, moving from one webpage, or to another website would be a lot more cumbersome. Hyperlinks play a vital role in search engine optimisation, with the amount of links and the anchor text used having a massive input in how relevant search engines consider a site to be to a particular key phrase. In an ideal world your website will link to, or benefit from those offering relevant content, with anchor text containing your keywords or phrases.
Hyperlink No Follow Variant
< a href =” http: // www . exampledomain . com” title= ”keyword” rel=” nofollow” > Anchor Text Keyword </a>
Generally speaking, links on web pages are considered to be “votes” or “endorsements”. However there are times when you may wish to point your visitors to a particular website, but may not wish to “vote” for it so to speak. In this case, adding a nofollow tag is a solution and is in fact advised by Google if you happen to be placing paid advertisements on your webpage.
The nofollow tag in conjunction with a robots.txt file can prevent Search Engines from indexing directories or pages on your website, with many webmasters choosing to keep content such as privacy policies and Ts&Cs out of the Search Engines.
When beginning a search engine optimisation campaign it’s important to lay the foundations, otherwise its more than likely that you will find yourself fighting a loosing battle from day one.
On page SEO doesn’t need to be difficult or too time consuming, so here are some of the most important html tags for you to consider and to implement throughout your website.
The Title Tag
<head>
<title>Keyword</title>
</head>
A concise, keyword orientated title is one of the best ways to improve the rankings for pages in your site, and to grab visitors attention who may be presented with your site as part of Google’s search results.
In terms of length, the optimal character length (including spaces) is 68 as this is the number of characters Google will display in its SERPs.
It is important to create unique title tags that are relevant to your content for each page on your website, as it is one of the primary sources of information for spiders or robots crawling your site.
H1,H2 and H3
<h1>Most Important</h1>
<h2>Second Most</h2>
<h3>Third Most</h3>
<h4>Forth Most</h4>
<h5>Fifth Most</h5>
<h6>Sixth Most</h6>
By definition, the <h> tags are used to define headings in html. The first <h1> is the most important, and should always be used for the title of the page. The following tags <h2> to <h6> should then be used to define sub headings, or sections on a page in order of importance. Usually web pages won’t go beyond the <h3> tags as they will instead feature multiple <h2> tags, providing that the sub headings are of equal importance. The heading tags are a key aspect of telling a search engine what your page is about, so don’t use them simply for design purposes – a mistake that many web designers are guilty of doing.
Bold or Strong
<b>Keyword</b>
<strong>Keyword</strong>
The Bold and Strong tags should be used to enhance your visitors experience and to help emphasise the more important keywords on your webpage to the search engines. Realistically you should only be adding these tags once per keyphrase on your page and don’t over do it. In times gone by it was touted that inserting a specific amount of these tags would help you reach an optimum “keyword density”, but those theories have largely been dispelled by Google.
Image (XHTML)
<img src =”picture.jpg” alt=”keyword” />
Images make web pages look nice, and are in many cases, what users are searching for. First of all, to tell search engines what your image is, you need to include the “alt” section of the code. As well as this, in order to enhance your chances of gaining a good ranking in Image searches, your images’ keywords should be placed on the webpage, and in an ideal world, close to the image itself.
The alt description of the image is also necessary to comply with accessibility standards for people accessing the Web with devices other than a standard browser, such as screen reading software.
Hyperlink
< a href =”http : // www . exampledomain . com” title =” keyword”> Anchor Text Keyword </a>
Hyperlinks are a key element of what makes the world wide web what it is. Without these on web pages, moving from one webpage, or to another website would be a lot more cumbersome. Hyperlinks play a vital role in search engine optimisation, with the amount of links and the anchor text used having a massive input in how relevant search engines consider a site to be to a particular key phrase. In an ideal world your website will link to, or benefit from those offering relevant content, with anchor text containing your keywords or phrases.
Hyperlink No Follow Variant
< a href =” http: // www . exampledomain . com” title= ”keyword” rel=” nofollow” > Anchor Text Keyword </a>
Generally speaking, links on web pages are considered to be “votes” or “endorsements”. However there are times when you may wish to point your visitors to a particular website, but may not wish to “vote” for it so to speak. In this case, adding a nofollow tag is a solution and is in fact advised by Google if you happen to be placing paid advertisements on your webpage.
The nofollow tag in conjunction with a robots.txt file can prevent Search Engines from indexing directories or pages on your website, with many webmasters choosing to keep content such as privacy policies and Ts&Cs out of the Search Engines.