Making a website search engine optimisation (SEO) friendly doesn’t happen by magic.
Instead, SEO specialists look at various ways they can provide Google with clues about the relevancy and overall quality of your content.
HTML tags are one such method, as they add further information to help search engines crawl and understand websites.
If you’ve ever inputted content on a CMS such as WordPress, you might have added HTML tags without realising, as various formatting options create these tags on your behalf.
So let’s take a look at some of the most important HTML tags for SEO that can be used to make sure your content is found by your target customers.
Title Tags
Whenever you write a blog post or name a landing page, the title is arguably one of the most important pieces of information.
Also known as an H1 tag, title tags need to be written carefully to be SEO-friendly. Predominantly, this involves including the primary keyword within the tag. For example, if we wanted to write a high-ranking article about SEO agencies in Nottingham, our title tag could be ‘The 10 Best SEO Agencies In Nottingham’.
In essence, the title tag needs to be relevant to everything else found on that page to introduce the topic and help search engines understand what the rest of the article or page will be about.
Title tags should be intriguing to make users want to click on the page. They also need to have a specific character length so that the title will display correctly on search engine pages.
HTML code for a title tag:
<head>
<title>keyword</title>
</head>
Header Tags (H1-H6)
So we’ve got to grips with an H1 heading tag, which we know is one of the most important HTML tags for SEO within your content. But what about the rest of the available headings?
It’s possible to edit or manually add a tag to create a heading from H1 down to H6. These numbers have a scale of importance, with the lower the number denoting higher importance.
Specifically, H1-H6 tags look something like so:
<h1>Most important</h1>
<h2>Second most important</h2>
<h3>Third most important</h3>
<h4>Fourth most important</h4>
<h5>Fifth most important</h5>
<h6>Sixth most important</h5>
So when you highlight a heading and turn it into an H2 tag, that heading suddenly becomes larger and more important looking on the page. The contents within that heading also stand out more to search engines.
Crucially, heading tags aren’t designed purely as stylistic features, even if they do improve content readability. Instead, they need to be used with SEO-friendliness in mind.
Another important point about H1-H6 tags is that you should only use a heading tag that is one number above or below the previous heading tag. This often means H2 and H3 tags are the most commonly used heading tags, especially when breaking up large sections of content.
Bold Tags
Sure, a bold tag <i.e. <b> important word here </b> is so simple that it might not seem like it deserves a place on the list of the most important HTML tags for SEO.
But that’s where you’re wrong! That’s because bold tags help draw the eye to important pieces of information within large blocks of text.
Bold tags also signal to search engines that the words contained within the tag are of greater importance within the text.
Hyperlink
Links are incredibly important for on-page SEO, and the hyperlink HTML tag is how external and internal links are generated.
Starting with internal links can keep visitors on the page for longer by redirecting them to helpful resources or even pages where they can make a direct purchase. In contrast, if a page doesn’t have any internal links, then this doesn’t give the user anywhere else to click than the exit button.
External links can also be useful for SEO, as search engines like to see websites linking to high-authority sources within their content.
As SEO experts, there are additional attributes we can add to your links such as jump links or no follow links.
HTML code for a hyperlink tag:
<a href=”http://www.website.com/page.html” title=”keyword”>keyword</a>
Meta Tags
Meta titles and descriptions are usually added within the CMS, making them yet another HTML tag for SEO that you might not think of as HTML.
But if you take a look at how the text you input is read, this is an example of an HTML code for a meta description:
<meta name=”description” content=” Read this post from Imaginaire about how to make your website more SEO-friendly.”/>
Meta descriptions should contain the primary keyword of your content. They also need to follow a certain length so that they display correctly on search engines.
If you don’t manually write your meta tags, search engines will pull through information from the content instead, which may or may not be relevant.
Imaginaire – Get An SEO-Friendly Business Website
Did you know there are 142 different HTML tags in total? So while we’ve covered some of the most important in terms of SEO above, there are many more your website could potentially benefit from!
You’ll never know unless you get an SEO review from our experts here at Imaginaire.
We help businesses from across the UK to reach their target audience through curated SEO-friendly content and impactful web design.
Tell us more about your business goals and how our SEO team can help you by giving us a call at 0115 697 1367 or filling out our contact form.
