Important SEO Tags - Develop the Tools of Your Trade
Published on: May 26, 2008
There is nothing to debate, Google pays more attention to some HTML tags than it does to others. Just because Google doesn’t give a hoot about the meta keyword tag, is no reason to ignore all your other options.
Correct usage of the important HTML tags are an important part of Website Fundamentals.
Title Tag
The most important tag for any webpage from the SEO perspective is without a doubt the <title> tag. If you are a novice living in a vacuum then it is pretty easy to not even realize that this tag exists at all. It exists for the benefit of search engines, as well as for providing a bookmark / favorite label.
Having a page show up in Google’s SERPs with Untitled Document as its label is the kiss of death for any webpage. Even the Free websites make sure that the <title> tag is correctly filled out. Generally, whatever section header that clearly stands out as the page title for the benefit of visitors to your webpage should also go inside the <title> tags. Naturally, your primary keywords should be included in your page title.
Meta Description Tag
Next in importance is clearly the Meta Description tag. Under certain circumstances your meta description tag will show up in the SERPs. Google views this meta tag more as an indicator of webpage quality than anything else. Google expects every webpage to have a meta description tag, for each one to be unique, and for it to be readable by humans.
The lack of one, using the same meta description for the entire website, or stuffing keywords into your meta description tag will negatively affect your ratings in the SERPs. It is better to have no meta description tag at all than one that is duplicated on a number of other webpages. Or, one that is unreadable because it is stuffed with keywords.
It is simply a one or two sentence summary of your webpage. And, is what writers might call an executive summary of your hypertext document.
Section Headers
Next, you have your header tags <h1><h2> and <h3> which are used to weight appropriately the importance of each section header on your hypertext document.
Most any modern wordprocessor software today offers Heading 1, Heading 2, and Heading 3 as a built-in styling feature. Google is no different. Good SEO means that on each of your webpages, the most important label on your document is tagged with the <h1> tags. The next most import label is tagged with <h2> tags. And, after that comes the <h3> tags. Believe it or not, but header tags should be used to give emphasis to your targeted keyword words. So be sure to point out your important keywords to Google with the appropriate header tags.
This is because historically speaking headings 1, 2, 3, etc. were the first basic elements of style to have been developed, whether you are talking about a wordprocessing or a hypertext document. And, <h1>,<h2>,<h3> is simply how the WYSIWYG HTML Editors have implemented the heading styles in the HTML coding view of your hypertext document.
Ideally there should only be one use of the <h1> tags on each webpage. However, having several <h2> tags and even more <h3> tags is to be expected, on a major hypertext document.
Bold
And, finally there is some indication that Google pays more attention to text emphasized with bold fonts.
While a very negative person could call these HTML tags mere gimmicks, they are in reality simply the tools of the trade that are used to develop the content on each of your webpages.
You are dealing with brain-dead computers that are trying to parse your webpages, in order to make sense out of them. To successfully communicate with computers, you have to use the language that they understand. Effective targeting of specific keywords on each of your webpages takes both work and skill. And, these important SEO tags are the tools of your trade.
That is why the proper use of these HTML tags is always important.