Webmaster Resources | Search Engine Optimization | The Importance of HTML Tags

There are millions of web sites on the Internet, with more and more being added daily. Many people use search engines to find information on the internet, but the search engine may return a few thousand results for a popular keyword. Using HTML tags in a proper way is the first step for search engines can recognize your website and targeted keywords easily.

1. Page Title

The title tag of a web page is the most important factor to be considered when optimizing website for search engines. This is because most search engines place a high level of importance on keywords found in website title tag. You should use a short, descriptive title relevant to content of the webpage. Title tag length should be between 50- 80 chars including spaces. Do not include too many keywords in the title, just 1-2 most important keywords you want to target for the web page.

2. Meta Tags

Meta tags are one of the most important elements of a web page when a search engine indexes it. Search engines use meta tags to find out important information of a web page before they crawl the web page content.  Some search engines display description tag in search result after web page title. Some general rules for meta tags:
+ Keyword Meta tag not to exceed 1024 chars – includes spaces and commas.
+ Description Meta tag not to exceed 250 chars - includes spaces and commas.
+ Make sure you accurately describe the page content in the Description Meta tag.
+ Description Meta tag should have 3-4 important key words.

3. HyperLinks

Try to place descriptive text links in your homepage to other relevant pages in your website. Doing this can help you to improve your listing on search engines. The search engines basically figure that other pages that you link to are likely to be closely related to the content of your page. For that reason some of the engines actually look for keywords in the hyperlinks and any text immediately surrounding the hyperlinks. It means that you should include the most important keyword phrases in the link itself and possibly the surrounding text.

4. Image 'alt' Attribute
Almost all web pages contain images, so it is important that you use the alt attribute on images and describe as much as possible about the image. This will help search engines index your website better. Make sure you use descriptive text with no more than 2-3 keywords per image.

5. Incoming Links
Make sure you have links coming into as many pages as possible, not just the home page. What does it tell a search engine when other web sites are linking to different pages on your site? Obviously you have lots of valuable content. The more inbound links you have, the higher ranking your website in search results.

6. Things that you should avoid
If you want to optimize your website for search engines, avoid using frames, dynamic URLs, flash and JavaScript as search engines have difficulties recognizing contents from these elements.