Optimizing Content for SEO: Best Practices and Tips
Optimizing Content for SEO: Best Practices and Tips.
You can write good content, attract backlinks, and do your best in page layout design. But all the above are hardly useful without HTML tags.
as meta tags are useless if the page itself is terrible…
**Google’s John Mueller said that Google uses HTML meta tags to create SERP snippets, not for rankings. But in this statement, he acknowledges that a good search snippet drives people to your page. So, meta tags are definitely something you should take care of to get traffic.
HTML tags tell Google about the page’s content in a highly digestible way, so it’s a critical component to SEO success.
Also, Google can lower your position if you misuse HTML meta tags – intentionally or not. This is another sign that meta tags are important.
So, let’s dive into it. Here are the top 10 HTML meta tags for you to use on your site. Read carefully and borrow best practices.
1. Title tags
The title tag is important for your page’s SEO
The <title> element typically appears as a clickable title in search engine results pages (SERPs) and also appears in social networks and browsers.
For example, if you look at the HTML of this article, you’ll see that the title is:
<title>10 Most Important Meta Tags You Need to Know for SEO</title>
Title tags are placed in the <head> of your web page and are intended to provide a clear and concise idea of what the page is about.
Do they have as big an impact on rankings as they’ve been saying for years?
In the past few years, user behavioral factors have often been discussed as logical evidence of relevance and thus a ranking signal – even Google representatives acknowledge its influence.
The page title is still the first thing a searcher sees in the SERPs, and helps them decide if the page can answer a search intent.
A well-written article can increase the number of clicks and traffic, which at least has some impact on rankings.
A simple experiment can also show that Google doesn’t need your title tag to determine the topic the page covers.
For example, a few years ago, a Google search for [how to build brand awareness] would bring up 2 of the top 5 results with topics exactly matching your query.
Search engines are looking at the whole picture, and they evaluate the content of a page as a whole, but the book cover still matters – especially when it comes to communicating with searchers.
Best practices:
Give each page a unique title that concisely and accurately describes the page’s content.
Keep titles to 50-60 characters long (so they don’t get truncated in SERPs). Remember that long titles are shortened to about 600-700px on SERP.
Put important keywords first, but in a natural way, as if you were writing titles for your visitors.
Use your brand name in the title. Even if it’s not showing up on the SERPs, it will still make a difference to the search engines.
Tip: Use your title to grab attention:
The title tag is valuable not only because it’s prime SERP real estate, but also because it serves as a tab title in your web browser.
This is exactly the same method used by Facebook and LinkedIn to show you that you have notifications, and it can be used to great effect.
2. Meta description tags:
Meta descriptions also reside in the <head> of a web page and usually (though not always) appear in SERP snippets along with the title and page URL.
For example, this is the meta description of this article:
<meta name=”description” content=”HTML tags are more important than ever for SEO. In this post, I’m sharing the top 10 HTML meta tags you need to know.” />
While the meta description isn’t a direct ranking factor, it does require your optimization effort to grab users’ (and Google’s) attention.
The meta description is what people see next to the title in search snippets, so it’s one of the aspects that makes them decide if your page is clickable.
Description affects the number of clicks you get and can also improve CTR and reduce bounce rates if the content of the pages lives up to the promises. The description should therefore be as realistic as it is inviting and clearly reflect the content.
If your description contains keywords that a searcher used in their search query, they will appear in bold on the SERP. This helps you stand out and tell the searcher exactly what they will find on your page.
If Google thinks your description doesn’t match your page content, it can adjust its description accordingly. So make sure your meta description includes the main keyword and is fundamentally relevant.
There’s no way to put the keywords you want to rank for in the meta description, and there’s no real need – instead, write a few coherent sentences describing your page summary, including some Key words included.
A good way to find out what to write in your meta description, what works best for your particular topic at the moment, is to do some competitive research.
See how your top-ranked competition fills in their own descriptions to make sense of the best use cases for each particular case.
Best practices:
Give each page a unique meta description that clearly shows what the page is worth.
Google snippets are usually 150-160 characters (including spaces) maximum.
Include your most important keywords so they can be featured on the original SERP, but be careful to avoid keyword stuffing. Don’t just make your description a collection of keywords you’re targeting.
Optionally, use an eye-catching call to action, a unique proposition you offer, or additional clues about what to expect – ‘learn,’ ‘buy,’ constructs, etc.
Do not use quotation marks, because Google will cut off your snippet there.
Meta tip:
A meta description should not be just one sentence that repeats the first paragraph of your page’s text.
Be creative — include calls to action (CTA) to encourage action if relevant, use variations of keywords (i.e. not the same keyword you used in the title), and search intent. Keep in mind.
For example, if you have an information page about scallops, it’s a good idea to make your meta description a definition of scallops. If your page tells you how to cook scallops, consider a delicious, crusty description for your recipe.
If you’re a fishmonger selling fresh scallops, describe how fresh they are and encourage people to buy ASAP with some CTA.
3. Heading Tags (H1-H6)
Heading tags are HTML tags used to identify different sections of a page’s content and act as short headings for different sections.
The use of heading tags is a source of some debate these days.
Although H2-H6 tags are not considered as important to search engines, many industry studies emphasize the proper use of H1 tags.
Although H2-H6 tags were initially used for UX purposes, the introduction of passage indexing in 2021 made them quite valuable. As such, Google can index and rank a portion of your page if the query matches the H3 heading and related paragraphs.
What we should think about instead is that headings are important to the organization of text and content, and we should take them seriously.
Using heading tags definitely adds to the content architecture.
For search engines, well-organized content is easier to read and understand than going through structural issues.
For users, headings are like anchors in a wall of text, guiding them to the page and making it easier to digest.
These factors increase the importance of careful optimization, where small details add up to the bigger SEO and user-friendliness picture and can lead to increased rankings.
Best practices:
Keep your headings relevant to the part of the text they describe. Just because they aren’t a ranking factor doesn’t mean search engines don’t take them into account.
Always let your headlines reflect the sentiment of the text they’re placed on. Avoid headings like “Chapter 1… Chapter 2… Chapter 3…”
Don’t overuse the tags and keywords in them. Make it readable for users.
Should your title tag and H1 match?
Google’s recommendations, you’re encouraged to match your page title and H1, tweaking the layout a bit and changing it up here and there.
So, if you’re struggling to come up with the perfect H1, just reuse your headline.
4. Image Alt Attributes:
An image alt attribute is a tag that you add to an image to provide a written description.
Alt attributes are important in terms of on-page optimization for two reasons:
Alt text is displayed to visitors if a particular image cannot be loaded (or if images are disabled).
Alt attributes provide context because search engines cannot “see” images.
For e-commerce sites, images often have a significant impact on how a visitor interacts with a page.
Google also makes it clear: Helping search engines understand what images are about and how they relate to the rest of the content can help them serve pages for appropriate search queries.
According to Mueller, a thoughtful image alt description is also essential if you want to rank in Google Images.
Remember, however, the importance of relevance: it’s not just that alt text, titles, and captions need to be relevant to the image, but the image must also be placed in its proper contextual context.
Best practices:
Do your best to optimize the most prominent images (product images, infographics, or training images) that will likely show up in Google Image searches.
Add alt text to pages that don’t have a lot of content other than images.
Keep alt text clear and descriptive enough, use your keywords judiciously, and make sure they fit naturally into the overall canvas of the page’s content.
5. Nofollow attributes:
External/outbound links are links from your site that point to other sites.
Naturally, these are used to cite proven sources, point people to other useful resources, or mention a related site for some other reason.
These links are very important for SEO: they can make your content look like a hand-crafted composite piece backed up by reliable sources or a link dump with less valuable content.
Google is known for its strong aversion to manipulative tactics, which can result in fines, and is no less adept at detecting them.
Also, during a semantic search, Google can contextualize the sources you cite to better understand the content on your page.
For both of these reasons, it’s worth paying attention to where and how you link.
By default, all hyperlinks are followed, and when you place a link on your site, you’re essentially giving a “vote of confidence” to the linked page.
When you add the nofollow attribute to a link, it instructs search engine bots not to follow the link (and not pass any link equity).
In HTML, the nofollow link attribute looks like this:
<a rel=“nofollow” href=“https://www.apple.com”>Apple</a>
In addition to the traditional nofollow, Google has introduced two more options for specifying a nofollow link, rel=”sponsored” for paid links and rel=”UGC” for user-generated content such as forum comments:
Keeping your SEO clean, you will maintain a healthy balance between followed and nofollowed links on your pages but generally set the following types of links to nofollow:
Links to any resources that may in any way be considered “untrustworthy material”.
Any paid or sponsored links (you don’t want Google to catch you selling your “vote”).
Links to comments or other types of user-generated content that may be spammed beyond your control.
6. Robot meta tag:
A page-level robot meta tag with the content=”noindex” attribute instructs search engines not to index any pages.
A nofollow attribute instructs not to follow any links on that page.
Although these tags aren’t directly related to rankings, in some cases, they can have some impact on how your site looks overall to search engines.
For example, Google strongly dislikes thin content.
Although it may not be intentional, your site may contain pages that provide little value to users but are necessary for some reason.
Additionally, there may be “draft” or placeholder pages that need to be published before being fully optimized.
Ideally, you would not want these pages to be considered when evaluating the overall quality of your site.
In other cases, you may want certain pages to stay out of the SERPs because they offer a special deal that is only accessible through a direct link (for example, from a newsletter).
Finally, if you have site-wide search enabled, Google recommends turning off custom results pages, which can be crawled indefinitely and use bot resources without any unique Can be wasted on materials.
In the above cases, noindex and nofollow tags are very helpful, as they give you some control over the appearance of your site to search engines
Best practices:
Block unnecessary/incomplete pages with thin content that have little value and have no intention of appearing in the SERPs.
Block pages that unreasonably waste the crawl budget.
Be careful not to accidentally stop important pages from being indexed.
7. rel=”canonical” link tag:
The rel=”canonical” link tag is a way of telling search engines which version of a page you consider important and would like search engines to index and find.
This is typically used in cases where the same page is available under multiple different URLs, or multiple different pages contain very similar content covering the same topic.
Internal duplicate content is not treated as strictly as copied content, as there is usually no intent to manipulate it.
Still this can be confusing for search engines: unless you specify which URL you prefer to rank with, search engines can choose it for you.
Selected URLs are crawled more often, while others are left behind.
You can see that while there is almost no penalty risk, such a situation is not much better.
Another benefit is that canonicalizing a page makes it easier to track performance statistics associated with the content.
According to Google, using rel=canonical for duplicate content helps Google consolidate all your efforts and redirect link signals from all versions of the page to the preferred version.
This is where using canonical tags can help direct your SEO efforts.
SEO Best Practices:
Pages with similar content on the same topic.
Duplicate pages available under multiple URLs.
Versions of the same page with session IDs or other URL parameters that don’t affect content.
Use the canonical tag for near-duplicate pages with caution: if two pages connected by the canonical tag are too different in content, the search engine will simply ignore the tag.
8. Schema markup:
Schema markup is a specific technique for organizing the data on each of your web pages in a way that search engines recognize.
This is a great feature to implement as it is a real win.
Having a structured schema markup:
A great boost for your UX.
Has great SEO value.
Improves understanding of content.
Helps to get into SERP features.
Increases the chances of winning rich pieces.
SEO has gone far beyond just keywords and backlinks. Having relevant and properly applied structured data on your pages is, in many cases, essential if you want to attract traffic and rank higher.
For example, if your site is from the e-commerce space, you’ll have no choice but to add Product Schema markup to your product pages. Otherwise, your piece will be lost.
The same is true for sites about cooking — search for any recipe, and you’ll see nothing but the Recipes SERP feature.
Note: Most of today’s popular content management systems, especially those related to e-commerce like Shopify, have relational structured data built in by default.
A “semantic web” is a “meaningful web”, where the focus shifts from just keyword instances and backlinks to the concepts behind them and the relationships between those concepts.
Structured data markup is exactly what helps search engines not only read content but also understand what certain words are related to.
SERPs are so advanced that you may not even need to click on the results to get the answer to your question.
But if someone is going to click, a rich piece – with a good photo, a 5-star rating, specific price range, stock status, operating hours, or whatever else is useful – is more than enough. It is likely to catch an eye and attract more clicks. A plain text result.
Assigning schema tags to specific page elements enriches your SERP snippet with information that is useful and appealing to users.
And, back to square one, user behavior factors like CTR and bounce rate affect how search engines rank your site.
SEO Best Practices:
Study the schemas available at schema.org.
Map out your most important pages and decide on concepts relevant to each.
Apply markup carefully (use the Structured Data Markup Helper if needed).
Check the markup thoroughly to make sure it is not misleading or incorrectly included.
9. Social media meta tags:
Facebook initially introduced OpenGraph so you could control how a page would look when shared on social media.
Twitter Cards offer similar enhancements but are exclusive to X (Twitter).
Here are the main OpenGraph tags:
og:title – Here, you put the title you want to be displayed when your page is linked.
og:url – URL of your page.
og:description – Description of your page. Remember that Facebook will only display a description of 300 characters.
og:image – Here, you can put the URL of the image you want to be displayed when your page is linked.
Use specific social media meta tags to show how your links look to your following.
This isn’t a huge tweak and doesn’t affect your ranking on search engines.
However, by adjusting how your page links look, you can greatly increase your CTR and UX metrics.
SEO Best Practices:
Add data, and test the URLs to see how they will be displayed.
Set up X (formerly Twitter) cards and validate them once completed.
10. HTML5 Semantic Tags
HTML5 semantic tags belong to the latest HTML standard and are essential to help Google and other search engines better understand page content.
HTML5 tags in the page’s source code look like:
<Article>
<h1>10 Most Important Meta Tags You Need to Know for SEO</h1>
<p>Title tags are placed in the <head> of your web page and are intended to provide a clear and concise idea of what the page is about.</p>
Examples of HTML5 tags
Many HTML5 tags are widely used by SEOs today. If you take a closer look at these tags, you’ll see that their names repeat the most common elements found on any page, such as videos, menus, etc.
So here they are (most of them):
<article> — defines a large and meaningful piece of content (an article, a forum post, etc.) that goes as a standalone unit.
<audio> – Displays the embedded sound or audio stream.
<details> – Defines a widget from which the user can get additional information or control on demand.
<dialog> – Defines a dialog box or a sub-window that the user can interact with if needed.
<embed> — embeds a piece of multimedia content such as videos, sounds, or any external apps.
<footer> – Defines the content of the footer of a page, document, or section.
<header> — Specifies the content of the header section of a page, document, or section.
<main> — defines the most important and meaningful part of the page’s content, or <article> (<main> can be placed inside an <article> section).
<nav> — Specifies the section of the page with navigation links.
<picture> — defines a container for multiple image sources.
<source> — Displays alternative sources for embedded media elements such as <audio> or <video>.
<summary> — Along with <details>, this element provides a user-visible summary.
<svg> — embeds an SVG file in an HTML document.
<time> — encodes dates and times (anniversaries, events, meetings, etc.) in a machine-readable format.
<video> — embeds video content in an HTML document without requiring an additional plugin to play the video.
SEO Best Practices:
The truth is that HTML5 tags replace the neverending <div> we all know and use these days.
Still, HTML5 attributes can help your content index faster and better, as Google clearly sees and understands what <article> is, <video> is, and navigation links. Where to find a set of <nav>.
This is why the single best practice regarding HTML5 tags is to actually use them on your pages and apply them correctly — a specific tag to a specific piece of content.
Don’t try to cheat and mark up textual content with the <video> tag — Google won’t like it.
conclusion:
HTML meta tags are an evergreen SEO technique, as HTML is the foundation of every page on the web. These are the basics that should never be neglected in your on-page SEO.
Sometimes, this “basic” issue is what keeps you from ranking at the top, because Google can’t recognize your content.
Well, you get the idea. Also, today’s AI hype makes using the right HTML tags even more important — they help Google understand content, build relationships, and thus train AI.
SEO continues to evolve, and so does HTML, and new tags appear. See news, stay informed, and use tags.
