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How and why you should Tag your website properly for a better SEO.

Posted on 04. Oct, 2009 by Senthil Ramesh in SEO, Tutorial

So you have now created a site and waiting for search engines to index your site. You write good content and deliver best services. But still you are not in a good position in SERP as you expected. You have been thinking over it and go for the SEO expert to analyse over the issue. But there are some basic things you must know making your site visible to the search engines. One such thing is Tagging your website properly.

Why should I tag my website?

Its so easy to design websites easily nowadays and there has been many tools evolved for it. These tools make your website look good and can make the user interference easier. But there are some things user can see and interact while the search engines cant. Making some small things better can make your site’s visibility higher and get you more natural traffic.

How can I do that?

Its not a daunting a task to do and some easy to understand tweaks can make the site better. There are some HTML tags you should alter and make the pages both user and search engine friendly. I am here explaining few of the tags that you can have an eye over it and tweak it for better optimised site.

Title and Heading Optimisation:

First of all, making a better SEO, the content of the page should be properly organised for the look and feel, navigation etc.., This covers the on page optimisation factor of SEO. This optimisation factors can make you more productive as it makes the users to effectively use the site and refer to the others. But there is two of the important things that must be taken most care

Title

Have a title that gives the summary of the webpage and have the keywords you target in a sparse way so that you are not spammed.

Heading tags

Having a good heading optimisation im the website can get you more site visibility. It has been said that Search Engines more attention to H1 heading tags. So use heading tags properly for better optimisation. Using H1 for the main headings and H2 or H3 for Sub headings can make your content look good for the users and visible for the search engines.

Bold and Italics Tag:

In HTML the font can be made bold are italicized for catching the attention of the users and also to show they are more important ones. This can be done by including <b> tag to make it Bold and <i> to italicize. Users can know that they show some important information and also they are stressed more than other texts. This makes they can understand the emotion of the writer. But when search engines come to the site and crawl these tags they can see the <b> and <i> tags but the emotions that are represented along with. There are some alternatives for it.

• Use <strong> tag instead of <bold> or <b> tag
• Use <em> tag instead of <i> tag

This can make both the search engine crawler and the screen reader to understand the text has been stressed more than the others.

Alt Tag for Images:

The search engines can crawl your website and get the data from your site,keywords, descriptions so that it can index your site and give the results for the related queries. But what if your site has images illustrate what you want to say visually. The crawlers cant see what is in the image and index. So making a small description of the image can help the crawlers to know about them and deliver them to the users. There comes the use of Alt tag that displays some text to users when the image can not load. You can use this to describe the image so that search engines make note of it. Include the keywords you target for the page in the alt tag of the image.

Usage: <img src=”googledoodle.jpg” alt=”New Doodle From Google”>

Table Summary Tag:

As like images Tables are also not visible to the search engines and the contents in it. So making a small summary of what you are saying about in the table can make your intention visible to the search engines and help it to index them.

<table border=”2” summary=”This tables describe the various search engines and their rise in market share for the past month”>
<tr>
<th>Search Engine</th>
<th>Increase Percentage</th>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Google</td>
<td>7.6</td>
</tr>
<td>Bing</td>
<td>10.7</td>
</tr>
<td>Yahoo</td>
<td>4.7</td>
</tr>
</table>

NoFollow:

Google announced an attribute called NoFollow in 2005 for linking to other websites. NoFollow links are attributed to the links that are instructed to search engines not to follow it. Proper use of NoFollow links can make a great difference especially in the page rank. NoFollow links are said to not pass any SEO link juice like the page rank and the anchor text by the link. But Google recently announced to change its view on NoFollow links because many webmasters use it to make some pages in their site hidden providing them as NoFollow. So PageRank will be passed to the NoFollow links and Google will follow it but do not index them. Yahoo does the same while Bing dont follow or index it. However it is you can provide NoFollow links when linking to unnecessary sites but do want to show them that you have linked them.

Usage: <a href=”link_url” rel=”nofollow”>Anchor Text</a>

You can use the attribute any where in the opening tag like this:

<a rel=”nofollow” href=”link_url”>Anchor Text</a>

NoFrames:

It is now common to use frames in websites for a better look and feel and also to have good user interaction. A single page can have multiple frames and users can navigate through the site in the main frame. But the search engine crawlers cannot identify the frames and process the information. Also some old browsers too don’t support frames. So <noframes> was introduced where these types of problems can be overcome. You can construct your site with frames and give an alternate <noframes> tag and its content so that search engines can crawl it and the users using browsers with no support for frames can access it.

Usage:

<body>
<frameset>
<frameset cols=”25%,*”>
<frameset src=first.html>
<frameset src=second.html>
</frameset>
<noframes>
Alternative HTML for displaying in the browsers not supporting Frames
</noframes>
</body>

Abbreviations and Acronyms:

We nowadays using lot of acronyms and abbreviations. But search engines may not know correctly when you use them in your content. For example, if you use SEO often in your content it may index your page high for SEO but not for Search Engine Optimisation. So it is a good practice to include the expansion of those terms we can use the <abbr> tag or <acronym> tag. Though these two tags do the same thing, its upto you to use one of the both. Many webmasters go for <abbr> than <acronym>.

<abbr title=”Search Engine Optimisation”>SEO</abbr>

<acronym title=”Digital Millennium Copyright Act”>DMCA</acronym>

Using all these tags can make your site visible and get your rankings increase. There are more tags you can optimise to make your page optimised. That will be covered under “On Page Optimisation” later in the follow up of this post.

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Tags: html tags, On Page Optimisation, SEO, tagging, Tutorial