The main reason why you will have a business website is to drive traffic, and the majority of this traffic comes from the search engine.
One of the best and most important ways of engaging your potential audience is through the use of HTML tags for your website SEO.
HTML tags are really important to your business success than you might ever think.
First, let’s start with what HTML tags are for SEO
What Are HTML Tags for SEO?
HTML tags are small snippets of HTML coding that let the search engine read your website content properly.
Adding SEO tags in HTML on your website will rapidly improve its search engine visibility.
When the search engine crawls your website for content, it looks at the HTML tags in it.
HTML tags will help the search engine know what your web content contains.
Some of these HTML tags also improve how your website visitors view your content in the search engine.
Social media platforms also use content tags to show your articles.
HTML tags for SEO affect your website performance on the search engine result pages so take it seriously.
Without these tags, you have no chance of connecting with your potential customers.
Let’s look at the most important SEO HTML tag list you need for your website.
1. Title Tags
The title tag is the most important HTML tag for SEO. It is called the title tag because it gives your article a title.
It labels your content and the search engine sees your website page, every search result on the search engine is derived from the title tag.
Your title tag should match your website article so you will not confuse your potential audience.
For example, using the title “15 ways to write content” and then changing the title tag to “ <title>importance of content</title>” would confuse your website visitors.
What if the searcher was looking for how ways to write content, and when he clicked on your page he saw the importance of content?
He or she will likely skip your article in the search if something like that comes up.
This is because your title tag is important to your website visitors in the same way it is important to SEO.
Optimize the title tags on your website so your website can become visible to the search engine and website visitors.
2. Meta Description Tags
The meta description tag is another important HTML tag for SEO.
It is the HTML tag behind the information shown in the google search results.
The snippet of text under the title of a search result on the google search engine is pulled out from the description tag.
Take a look at this meta tag to understand better:
<meta name="description" content="Buy a high-quality fabric from us in Lagos and get a 10% discount on your first order.">
This is an example of a business owner/marketer using the key phrase “high-quality fabric” while letting the search engine and potential customers know that the business might be in Lagos.
It’s also what Google will display when the article is shown in search results.
Using keywords in your title and meta description tag will improve your website listing on the search engine.
3. Header Tags
Header tags are used to break up your website content for easy readability.
According to research, 50% of website visitors will spend no more than 15 seconds at most skimming your web content.
A header tag makes it easier for these visitors to easily find what they are looking for.
Header tags are what the search engine uses to determine segments of your web content and also to create featured rich snippets.
Here is the hierarchy of header tags:
4. Alt Tags for Images
Image is one of the most important and necessary ways to engage your website visitors because images attract people's attention more than ordinary text.
In fact, your website views will likely increase by 95% if you use graphics in your web articles.
But search engines cannot determine the type of images you are using, that’s why the ALT tag is necessary.
Without the ALT tag, the search engines will not be able to know what the image is about. And this can reduce the website's visibility during image searches.
5. The Robots txt Tag
The robot txt tag is used to prevent certain web pages from being indexed by the search engine.
The inclusion of the robot txt tag in some web pages will stop the search engine from crawling it.
Robot txt tags might be used on your website for pages that contain articles that might not be used for ranking factors.
Let’s say you have an article on your website that you want to share with your website visitors, but the article is lacking real quality value and information.
In a scenario you would make use of something like;
<meta name="robots" content="noindex, nofollow">
After you have done something like this, the search engine will not index the content nor follow any of the links.
You need to be careful when using these HTML tags for SEO so you don’t affect your website ranking unknowingly.
You can give your website SEO to a professional if you find it difficult to do it yourself.
6. Use Canonical Tags when Appropriate
After is accessible in varieties of ways after it has been created. For example, all of these domains can link to the same site:
Canonical tags are really useful in the ranking factor of your website.
Canonical tags tell the search engine about the important domain to you.
Say you want a specific domain layout as your primary. In a situation like that, you would use something like this:
<link rel="canonical" href="https://yourwebsite.com/">
This tells the search engine that “https://yourwebsite.com/” is the URL on which you’re focusing.
Using the canonical tags will tell the search engine the domain you want to rank for instead of having rankings across other varieties of your domain name.
7. Responsive Site Meta Tags
You need to pay attention to the design and mobile responsiveness of your website because about 60% of online users use their mobile phones to search for information about a product or business.
Having a mobile-friendly website will help your business succeed.
You can inform the search engine that you have a mobile responsive website and design.
You can add the following to inform the search engine about your mobile responsive website.
<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1">
Google put lots of emphasis and relevancy on websites that are mobile-friendly.
Having a mobile responsive website will increase your business sales and as well increase your website ranking on the search engine.
Using a content management system like WordPress will make your website to be mobile responsive by default.
So if you are using WordPress you don’t need to inform google that your website is mobile responsive.
Increase Traffic with HTML SEO Tags
Getting the attention of your potential audience is more than writing long articles or blog posts.
Without the use of HTML tags, your potential audience would never know that your business exists, and with the number of online competitors in your industry, you will need every advantage possible to have more visibility than they have.
HTML tags can be used if you are using WordPress for your website or if your website was created using code.
It is important to your business's online success.