HyperText Mark-up Language (HTML) is the standard mark-up language for documents used by web pages to indicate browsers what elements it contains and which one should be displayed on the screen.
HTML tags are small snippets of HTML coding indicating search engines how to properly “read” your content. By adding SEO tags in HTML, you can significantly improve search engine visibility.
When a search engine crawler visits your site, it takes a look at the HTML tags of the site. This information helps search engine to know what your content is about and how to categorize the material. With the use of HTML elements, SEOs can share information on web pages to people as well as search engines.
Title tags are the clickable headlines that appear in the SERP. These tags are important for usability and search engine optimization. They help to accurately and briefly describe the content of the page so that searchers are encouraged to visit the page and search engines have enough information about the topic of the page. Title tags are displayed in the snippet as well as in the browser tab, which helps users understand what pages are open in the browser. Typically, it is up to Google to create a SERP headline for any webpage, and it could use any section of headings from a page, or it may even create a completely new headline to be displayed in search results.
Best practices
Meta description tags are HTML tags used for setting up descriptions within search result snippets. They are not always used by Google to create snippets; however, if there are meta tags on your page, there is a good chance that your meta description will make it onto the search results.
Best Practices
Keep in mind that there is no strict rule for writing meta descriptions, as if you write one altogether, then Google will write one for you.
Keep in mind – Google sometimes ignores the meta description tag and fetches a bit of copy from the page. This happens when a quote is a better match for a specific search query than the meta description tag.
Most people don’t have the attention span to read the entire article, so instead they scan the article until they reach the section they like and read that section, and then we bounce. Headings provide the core of the content to the search engines and help them understand what the page is about.
Best practices
Keep in mind – The heading should not be confused with the title tag. H 1 is displayed on your website, while the title tag is displayed in search results.
There are primarily two objectives for using image alt text on a page. The first goal is to make it easy for users who cannot view it to understand it, such as those with impaired vision. The second goal is to get your image indexed by search engines.
Best practices
Find all the images without alt text tags and make sure to add them. You can use tools like Ranks Pro to crawl your website and make a list of imageswith missing alt text.
Open Graph Tags are HTML tags that indicate social media platforms how you want your page to look when shared on social media. By using these tags, you can make better post that attract more targeted users
Best practices
Schema mark-up is used for enhancing regular SERP snippets with rich snippets. There is a collection of tags hosted by schema.org. These tags were jointly developed by Google, Bing, Yahoo!, and Yandex. These tags are used by web masters to provide additional information related to different types of pages. This information is used by search engines to enhance their SERP snippets with various rich features. There is no guarantee that using Schema mark-up improves one’s chances of ranking. However, the resultant mark-up usually appears better than regular snippers and improves chances of being featured on search results.
Best practices
HTML5 elements is a set of intuitive tags describing page components used for better descriptions of the various page components. Here are some of the commonly used semantic HTML5 semantic tags for SEO
<article> — this tag is used for describing a meaningful content piece such as article, forum post etc
<audio> — this tag is used to show an embedded sound or audio stream;
<details> —It is used to describe a widget from which the user can get additional information or control on demand
<dialog> — It describes a dialog box or a sub window a user can interact with in the need of necessity;
<embed> —It is used to embed a piece of multimedia content like videos, sounds, or any external apps;
<footer> — it is used for describing the footer of a page
<header> —it is used for defining the content of the header section of the page
Best practices
Keep in mind – The best way to optimize HTML5 semantic tags is to apply them correctly
Robots meta tag are all about setting rules of engagement between website and the search engines. In other words, website owners set up rules for crawling and indexing their pages. Some of these rules are mandatory, while others are like recommendations and may not be followed by all search engines, but mainstream search engines often will follow them. These tags have four main values for search engine bots, such as the following
Best practices
Keep in mind – I there is no meta robots tag on a website, then the search engine crawlers will do as they please.
Canonical tags save you from the risk of duplication. These tags are HTML link tags with attributes to ‘rel=canonical’. They are used to indicate to search engines that there are other web page versions. By implementing this in the code, a website indicates to the search engines that the URL is the main page and search engine should not index other pages.
Best practices
Meta viewport tag provide instructions to the web browser on how the page should be rendered and displayed on various devices. It helps you control the width and scaling of the viewport or the area of a page visible to a user, so it is correctly displayed on all sizes of screens including desktops, laptops, tablets, mobile phones. It also tells Google that web page is mobile-friendly and can be displayed as a mobile search result.
Best practices
In order to avoid mistakes in your HTML tags that may affect the usability and ranking of your site, it is necessary to run a full analysis of the site. You can easily audit your entire website with Ranks Pro. A detailed analysis of your site page will show title tags, meta tags, no index, canonical and alternate tags. The tool also checks the headers and meta tags for duplicity, length restrictions and more. It also shows all duplicates and images with empty alt tags, evaluate h1-h6 tags and so much more. Besides, you can also manually configure how frequently audit should be performance based on your needs and how often should you make changes to the website.
Using the right HTML tags can significantly improve SEO of your website and help it to attain higher rankings in search results. By implementing HTML tags effectively, you can improve the usability of your site, and outrank your competitors.