If you’ve got an HTML website and you’re not getting traffic have you even checked if you’re using these vital SEO tags?
What is an HTML tag for SEO?
HTML tags are small snippets of code which help your website become more search engine friendly by making it easier for them to read it.
Without these tags, when your website is crawled, Google might miss vital information because it doesn’t know it’s there. meaning you missing out on crucial SEO benefits.
Here are the most important HTML tags for SEO
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The title tags
Singularly the most important HTML tag for SEO is the title tag. If you have incomplete title tags you’re missing a huge SEO opportunity here to tell the search engine what your page is all about.
A lot of the time websites might just have a one-word title tag, but here you need to use your main keyword and make it a sentence. You have around 65 characters so make it stand out.
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Meta Description tags
Underneath the page title in the search engine result pages is the meta description which doesn’t directly affect SEO but it can do by improving the click-through rate.
Think about it, with the page title and meta description tag you have two chances to speak to the user and make it simple for the search engine to understand what the page is about.
Ideally, use your main keyword in the meta description too, it helps to match the search query intent.
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Use heading tags on the page
A lot of people put content on their websites as just plain text. This is terrible for SEO and terrible for user experience too, no one wants to be looking at a long line of text.
This is why headings are used. You want the title of the page to be in a H1 heading, use your main keyword here to signify what the page is about. Using headings also makes it easier for your website to get more visibility through featured rich snippets.
Then the next heading you want to use is the H2 tag which clearly states that a new topic around the title is starting
What are the headings?
- H1 The main heading at the top of the page
- H2 Supporting the main heading but with long tail keywords
- H3 Explores further the h2 tag
- H4 Highlights points made in the h3 tag
- H5 Rarely used supports h4 tags
- H6 – not used but supports h5 tags
Use Alt Tag for all images
Search engines don’t know what’s in an image so we need to spell it out for them.
It’s important to use keywords when making image file names but it’s also important to add Alt text to make the image search engine friendly.
Let’s say solicitors, for example, may use an image with solicitors but that doesn’t necessarily explain the photo in full.
Add Employment law solicitors and it helps the search engine understand more about the image and can help give you an SEO boost helping your website show up more in image searches.
Try to make all Alt tags as unique as possible and always be 100% accurate with the description of the image.
Robots tags
The robot tags act like a security guard for your website, showing the search engines what pages they can index and what pages shouldn’t be indexed.
The aim here is to stop pages that you don’t want to be ranking in the search engines from being indexed and shown.
This is great for websites that like to post a lot of thin news articles about their business to readers on their website. A 150-word article won’t offer much value to Google but to your readers, they may find it beneficial.
All you need to do is add <meta name=”robots” and then show what you want the search engine to do with that page by adding content=”index, nofollow”>
Canonical tags for similar content
<link rel=”canonical”
Did you know Google can index different versions of a web page? To them, the two examples below are different pages
- https://klubclicks.com
- https://klubclicks.com/
Plus
- https://klubclicks.com
- http:// Klubclicks.com
but then also
- http://www.klubclicks.com
- https://www.klubclicks.com
You must direct all versions of your web pages to the same page.
<link rel=”canonical” then add “canonical” href=”https://yourwebsite.com/”>
This shows the search engines that the page you want to index is the priority choice.
Very view websites now use the actual www as their main domain name, so ideally, if you’re still using it that’s fine but if you’re setting up a new site, it’s probably best to use the no www version.
Plus, make sure you’ve got an SSL security certificate installed so you’re rocking the HTTPS protocol giving you the security padlock on your domain.
Do follow tag
A do-follow tag indicates to the search engine that you want to pass on link juice and let the search engine go on to crawl their website. This can be good but can also affect your crawl budget so if you’re linking out to a larger site, you don’t want to put do-follow
No follow tags
When you create a hyperlink from one webpage to another, search engines like Google will follow that link to determine the relevance and authority of the linked page.
However, some website owners may not want to pass on that authority or “link juice” to the linked page. This is where the “no follow tag” comes in.
The “no follow tag” is a piece of HTML code that website owners can add to a hyperlink.
When a search engine sees this tag, it understands that it should not follow the link and should not pass on any ranking credit or authority to the linked page.
The “no follow tag” is often used for links that are paid or sponsored, as Google’s guidelines prohibit the manipulation of search engine rankings through the use of paid links.
By using the “no follow tag” on these links, website owners can avoid any potential penalties for violating Google’s guidelines.
Open graph tags
You know when you’re on social media and you see a website and there’s the information displayed along with an image, this data is from the open graph tag.
These tags are used by social media platforms when your content is shared and will use the title, description and image that are used here.
It’s important to make sure it’s accurate though, you don’t want to be using the same tags for every web page.
Responsive site tags
<meta name=”viewport”
Remember when sites used to have a desktop site because that’s all anyone ever used then when mobiles became more popular they were dedicated mobile sites.
Now with responsive technology, you only need to make one site and make it responsive for all devices.