Basic HTML For SEO – Part 3, Heads Up!

By Elmer Boutin

Tweet The first section of the web page we’ll discuss in our HTML for SEO series is the <head></head> section. There are many tags which can be included in this area, but we’re going to concentrate on the three which can have the most effect on your Search Engine Optimization (SEO) efforts. Here they are in order of importance (in my opinion):

<title>Title of your web page goes here</title>
The contents of the title tag can make or break your SEO. The title of your web page needs to be clear and concise and help to show the search engines that this particular web page is THE page to display when someone types your key words into the search box. To make this happen, the title needs to contain those keywords which are also salted throughout the content of the page.

Don’t fall into the trap of naming all the pages on your site the same, or by having the first words in all your titles be the name of your web site or company. This isn’t going to show why this particular page is relevant to a search. It takes time, but coming up with individual titles for each page on your site is well worth the effort.

<meta name=”description” content=”Your description goes here” />
“Meta” is a term used to mean “data about data.” In this case, it’s meant to hold data about your web page, specifically the description. The description can be similar to the title, but it’s good to go into a little more detail. Still, try to keep the descriptions concise, too, at 150 characters or less. The description also needs to be salted with those same keywords from your content which went into the title to reflect how relevant this page is to those words.

The title and description of your web site are the most important elements of the head to get right. Combined with the content of your page, these two things can go along way to make or break your standing in search engine results pages.

<meta name=”keywords” content=”your, keywords, go, here” />
The keywords meta tag is the “on again, off again” tag in SEO. Most search engines don’t use them or they use them in a very limited capacity to determine relevancy. Still, it’s a good idea to enter your key words separated by commas. You never know, it might be used again later. If it is, you’ll be prepared for the change already if you’ve entered them.

Make sure to only enter the key words from your content, title tag data and description verbiage. Again, the idea is to show relevancy and not to see if you can game the system.

This is how the header might look in the web page:

<head>
<title>Title of your web page goes here</title>
<meta name=”description” content=”Your description goes here” />
<meta name=”keywords” content=”your, keywords, go, here” />
</head>

It doesn’t matter which order the tags come in. Also, there are other tags which can be put into the head section, but these the three are essential to making sure your page is properly optimized.

photo credit: demi-brooke