Optimising Tags On Your Website

Meta Tags, title tags, image tags, and H1 tags – all of these features on your blog or website contribute to the ability to reach the top search engine results pages. When it comes to optimising tags, the more of these types of tags you can manipulate, the better your site will be ranked.

Meta And Keywords Tags

You may have heard conflicting advice about the value of meta tags on your website. Some SEO experts believe they have value while others feel that their importance is overrated.

What they are is the descriptive words that are usually not visible, they reside in the page description and search engine crawlers look for them to categorise your site and its content.

People do see the Meta Tag description when they perform a search, as well. If your URL comes up in the listing of most search engine results, it will include your page title, along with the text from the meta tags section of your page.

The keywords tag is very similar to a meta tag except that it is merely a listing of the appropriate keywords to be associated with your site. Nowadays, there are some search engine crawlers which have purposely been programmed to ignore these tags, and one of the reasons their importance is sometimes discounted.

Title Tags

The title tag is the short phrase that appears in the browser bar of a visitor to your website. So when someone types in your URL, the title tag is printed on the top of the tab. This is what a human being sees.

What a search engine sees, however, is a bit different. They take the words in the title tag and use them to rank and categorise the site. So if a person performs a search for “computer repair”, for instance, those sites which include those exact words in their title tag will be located further towards the top of all results than others without.

Image Tags

If you have ever inserted an image into a blog post or a page of your website, you may have noticed the phrase “alt text=” in conjunction with the html code designating placement of the graphic. It is important to add a description of the image here. For instance, if you have inserted a picture of a half-eaten apple, type “apple with bite out of it” or something similar in the alt text area.

There are two reasons to do this. The first is that search engine bots cannot “see” images, they must rely on written words to tell them the context of a picture. The second reason is that visually impaired people cannot see the graphic, either. Again, they are relying on the text you include to tell them what is on the page.

H1 Tags

An H1 tag, or heading tag, gives search engine bots certain information. It is generally accepted that text which is of H1 size and font style denotes a heading on a web page. It is like the masthead on a newspaper, it very clearly and boldly states what the content on the page is about.

Consequently, you want to ensure that your H1 tags contain relevant keywords, since the H1 tag is weighted to be more important than the rest of the text on the page, which merely supports the title.

Paying attention to the various tags on your website pages – Meta Tags, keyword, title, image, and H1, is one more way to gain the attention of search engine crawlers and ensure a better placement on SERPs.

Although the value of some of these tips can be disputed, it certainly cannot be argued that properly optimising them all will cause any harm, so why not spend a bit of extra time on tags?