HTML Optimization and better SEO
Better late than never right? If you have been waiting for a quick introduction to the idea of HTML optimizaion this is where we get a little more technical in our efforts. For those of you who are already familiar with HTML remember this is a beginner's guide to SEO, so we still won't get overly detailed. We will however cover some aspects of optimizing your code to help in the never ending struggle to get more website traffic.
One thing that is a common occurance is a website having loads of existing content in place that hasn't been properly formatted, and generally lacking in better practices. If your website already contains multiple pages of content and you're worried about what it will take to go catch them up to the SEO trends, don't get to over worked. Or if you are starting a website from scratch and you want to take elements into consideration step-by-step from the ground up, this lesson will help you to. So let's take a peek at the HTML "code" that is the face of your web design, and how search engines might interpret it.
 Optimized HTML is your friend...
Anchor Tags: Think about it for a moment. What do you use to browse the internet? That's right, the anchor tag is a pinnacle point in search engine optimization and there are countless ways you will hear about how to leverage it. So a few things to implement that just about every SEM consultant will agree on as better practices towards improving your Google pagerank.
Make sure you format your anchor tags with SEO in mind. Meaning when you make a new link, remember to add certain elements like <title="Title of page the link points to"> providing you another opportunity to saturate those keywords we had you identify in an earlier step. However make sure the title in the anchor tag accurately describes the information it links to.
Example:
<a href="http://www.professionalsweb.net" title="Topeka SEO Consultants">Topeka SEO</a>
Avoid repetitive links to the same thing. While yes, it is a good idea to provide a couple routes of navigation to as many parts of your website as possible. This doesn't mean that every word of every sentence related to something else should be a link.
Anchor Tag Tip: There's also a couple tricks to stop the search engine spiders from certain behavior while they index your website. One of which was introduced to keep the links that you don't want followed from your website from taking that search engine robot to an irrelevant resource. To do this they implemented the "nofollow" relationship tag. Here's a quick example to give you an idea, but what rel="nofollow" does is tell that spider that the link it's used in should not be followed. Pretty self explanatory...
Example:
<a href="http://www.professionalsweb.net" title="Topeka Search Engine Optimization" rel="nofollow">Topeka Search Engine Optimization</a>
So we got to the links that drive the traffic around your website and how to better optimize them for the search engines. Now we need to look at how you generally display your content. If you're an HTML beginner than there's some things you need to start utilizing as you progress to build a strong base of better development practices. Even if not, a lot of HTML experts forget to employ some simple SEO tips in order to cut corners and provide speed instead of quality web development. So here's either some tips or a quick refresher.
Header Tags: A great way to tell search engine's that you're offering quality content is to format it correctly. A "header tag" is one of the most basic parts of how to do this. You're telling the website visitor that this header is a directly relavent summary of the text contained below it. You can format how these header tags are displayed through CSS which we'll cover in another article. For now though the 6 header tags are as follows and if employed correctly can help improve your search engine optimization.
- <h1></h1>
- <h2></h2>
- <h3></h3>
- <h4></h4>
- <h5></h5>
- <h6></h6>
Paragraph & Text Formatting: This topic will stir up all sorts of theories from "SEO experts" of all sorts. Many would believe this to be one of the key areas anyone can help improve their optimization efforts. For now though we're going to keep it simple and effective by making suresome of the basics are explained for the SEO beginners.
First, all paragraph's of text such as the one you're reading right now should be contained in the proper <p></p> tags. This is a declaration to whatever is interpreting that text on how it should be interpreted. Next try to use other text formatting tags to highlight key areas of the page that might represent the base of the topic. For example in this article you may have noticed we made relavent base text bold like <b>Search Engine Optimization</b> and subject highlight text italic like <em>emphasized text</em> in various places. Don't over do it, it's easy to do but try to remember a human will want to use your website as well. Not just the search engines.
IMG ALT Tag: Give all your images Alt tags! This is a very simple thing to do and makes a good difference if you you use directly relavent keywords in your tags that are directly related to the image in relation to the content of the page.
If you want more information and tips on accomplishing this more effectively look to our other articles but this should give you something to start with. When it comes to HTML and SEO just remember that the main optimization comes from just better practices. As well as adhering to the standards as much as you can as set by W3 compliancy standards.
You HTML ninja's know that it would take an entire new article in itself to cover this topic in depth so since this is a beginner's guide to SEO feel free to move on to the next page when you're ready for the fun to continue.
Better SEO Introduction | Keywords and Keyphrase | Title Relavency | Dynamic Content | Navigation / Association | Meta Tags Explained | SiteMaps and Robots | HTML Optimization | Inbound & Outbound Links | Link Building | Search Engine Submission
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