SEO tags
Search engines have come a long way from searching Titles and meta tags, now they are so good at understanding the content that even if your title doesn’t match the search query, it will be displayed in the search results if your content does.
Some tags however still help make it easier while your page is indexed and will in turn boost your page ranking, which we will be discussing below.
Title tag
In the search result, the title that you see comes from the content of the title tag.
So you can see why this tag is in fact quite important. The title tag is one of the most important tags when it comes to SEO as it helps the search engine in understanding the context of the page and should always be used well. The title should be clear with relevant keywords to give a general expectation of the type of content to not only search engines but also users looking through the search results.
The title is defined in the header part of the markup which looks like this:
<head>
<title>Your Title Goes Here</title>
</head>Meta description tag
The meta description is normally the snippet of text that is displayed below the title.
This may not always be the case though, as sometimes if your main body contains a text more relevant to the search topic, google may opt for it instead. But you should always try and include this description to give your page a higher ranking. Add descriptive phrases and like the title, make the description unique to the page.
<meta name="description" content="Something descriptive and relevant">Heading tag
The general rule of thumb when it comes to heading tags is “keep one h1 tag per page”. The h1 is used as the main heading to describe the content of the page and you want to limit it to one tag per page so the search engine isn’t confused with multiple main headings.
The headings tag follows a hierarchy so use the other headings tag like h2, h3, etc. to highlight other keywords on the page. By doing this you also give search crawlers a way to understand the content properly and boost Seo ranking related to the subject keywords.
Although keywords are important to get ranked, do not stuff keywords into headings, it should be coherent to the reader. In most cases, the title of the page can match the main heading.
Image alt attribute
The alt attribute is used to give a brief description of the image. When search engines crawl through a page they don’t have a way of knowing what your image represents, so by adding the alt attribute we are conveying that information which helps the search engine get more details for indexing the page.
You can add the alt attribute to an image in the following way:
<img src="/path-to-image.jpg" alt="image-description">Meta robots tag
The Meta robots tag is used when you want to tell the crawler not to index a page. The reasons for this may vary, like if some article is lacking some quality and you do not want it to show up in search results.
<meta name ="robots" content="noindex">
“robots” is used if you want to convey the message to all crawlers, so if you only need it for particular bots use their names instead like, googlebot, etc. You can also use a nofollow attribute if you do not want any links on a page to be crawled like this:
<meta name ="robots" content="nofollow">Nofollow attribute
A search engine will crawl your site by following all the internal links within it to index the content.
Normally you want all your internal links to be crawled so it could potentially show up in SERP, but there are cases where you need to use the nofollow attribute like for external links, or if the linked page is not up to quality yet.
Here is what it looks like:
<a href="https://example.com" rel="nofollow">Some Text</a>Canonical tag
Say you have a number of pages on your site that are quite similar in content, then in this case it would be difficult for the search engine to know which page should be given priority. That is where this tag comes in, you can simply add a canonical tag to tell the search engine that this page should be counted as the main one.
The syntax looks like this:
<link rel="canonical" href="http://example.com/" />Conclusion
Although there are some tags that can be ignored in terms of SEO, the above-mentioned tags should be used accordingly as it not only helps with ranking but also how your content is displayed to the user, which plays an equally high role in making your website accessible.
