I want to spend some time going over what you should be doing to optimize your website. This post will specifically cover Onsite or Onpage Optimization and in particular the use of HTML tags and how and what they are used for.
Title Tags
Title Tags
Title tags are a good place to start. If your goal is to get better rankings on the search engines than you should start by looking at your title tags. This is really the best starting place as these are the tags that the search engine spiders or crawlers will check to determine what a web page is really about. In fact, when you visit a search engine and you view the search engine results page and you click on the link to go to a particular page on a website, that link that you clicked on is usually “populated” by what is in the title tag. Once you get to the web page, the title tag will appear at the top of the browser window as well.
You can find the title tag in the header section of the HTML on a web page. If you go to a page on your website and right mouse click over the page and click on “view page source”, you will be able to see the HTML behind the page that you are looking at.
Where you find the title tag in the HTML syntax is below (it is in the header section of the HTML):
<HEAD> <TITLE>Your Web page Title Here</TITLE> </HEAD>
Your title tag doesn’t need to be particularly short but it is strongly recommended that you limit your title tag to 65 characters or less as many search engines will not display a title tag that is longer than this.
Make sure that your title tag matches the content on the page. It should be a short and concise statement that reflects or summarises the page content. However, keep in mind that there is an “ad copy” element to the title tag, because you want your tag to be compelling enough to make a person want to click on it on the search engine results page.
Each page on your website must have an unique title tag (never repeat the same title tag across different pages of your website). Furthermore, your title tags ought to be keyword rich (insert one or two keywords that you are wanting that particular page to rank for.
Meta Description Tags
Meta Description Tags
When a person goes to a search engine and they read the information that is displayed (under the title tag) that information comes from the Meta Description Tags. Therefore, it is important that all meta description tags are optimized.
As the name implies, the Meta Description tag contains a short description of what the page is about. Now some SEO Companies will argue that the search engine spiders don’t use this tag for ranking and therefore it is not important. Let’s assume they’re right that it is not used by the search engine crawlers. You should still optimize the tag because it is a way to deliver your marketing message to your readers. First you have a compelling title and then you have a compelling statement beneath the title.
You will find the meta description tag just like the title tag, in the header section of the HTML syntax. Unlike the title tag, you can actually write a couple of good sentences in here and you want to use this space to dangle a carrot, so to speak. You want to entice your reader to visit this page. Again, all your pages should have unique meta description tags just like they have unique title tags (absolutely no duplicates here) – remember that a search engine does not rank websites but rather web pages.
Google, by the way, does not use the Meta Description Tag for site description but rather generates its own description that it’s algorithm basis on the content of the page. Other search engines such as AllTheWeb, Teoma, Ask.com, AltaVista, etc, still use the Meta Description Tag and you mustn’t forget about these less popular search engines.
Meta Keywords Tag
The Meta Keywords Tag is, by most standards, the least important HTML tag, and that is probably because the search engine algorithms have discounted it so heavily because of spammy SEO abuse.
This tag contains the keywords that a web page is optimizing for separated by commas. Some SEO companies do not use this tag at all, as if it is wasting their time. I still use it because one never knows what the future holds and if for some reason a search engine found a use for this tag I would hate my clients having to go through all their pages and add this information in when it just takes me a little extra time now.
This tag as well is located in the header section of the HTML syntax. Each page of your website should have a short list of keywords within this tag (phrases are okay as well). The tags should be unique to that particular page.
Meta Robots Tag
Meta Robots Tag
STOP! That is what the Meta Robots Tag tells search engine spiders. It tells them to no index or sometimes to not follow a link. Now this tag is not as useful as the robots.txt file (which I’ll probably cover in another post). However, some web hosting services will not allow you to create and/or use a robots.txt file and therefore knowing how and when to use the Meta Robots tag is still extremely useful.
Like the others, this tag is found in the header area of the HTML code. Within the tag, you must include directives (tell the search engine what you want it to do with the information). There are a few common directives such as:
“noindex” – do not index page; ”index” – index page; ”nofollow” – do not follow links on this page; ”follow” – okay to follow links on this page
What you are doing usually is blocking particular content from the search engine spiders
Header Tags
Header Tags
Header tags are used to add emphasis to the content of your page. It draws the attention of both the reader and the search engine spiders. I use these to help add a hierarchical content structure like in an outline and I also use it to place keywords or key sections headings and lend emphasis to the content.
Header tags should be used on every page of your website. Unlike the other tags that we spoke about the header tags ironically are not found in the “header area” but rather in the “body” area of the HTML syntax. These tags can be used throughout your content anywhere in the body of the page.
The header tags run from <H1> through <H6> in numerical order of importance, with <H1> being the most important heading. Usually content that is placed within the header tags will appear larger then the surrounding text; with <H1> being the largest and getting smaller as the headers proceed to <H6>.
You can change the appearance of your header tags by altering the formatting in the CSS code.
Those are the main HTML tags used in Onpage or Onsite SEO. There are other important factors as well such as text modifiers (strong, emphasized, bolded, Italic, Underlined) that we will cover in another topic. I hope you enjoyed and let me know if you have any questions.
As a reminder, those of you who are using WordPress as a CMS can easily change these tags by using SEO plugins.
800-660-8375
