How HTML and SEO Work Together To Get Your Website Noticed
Are you familiar with HTML, or HyperText Markup Language, the standard markup language for creating web pages? If so, you may already know that it’s used to structure and format content on the web. But did you know that HTML can also play a crucial role in search engine optimization, or SEO?
In this blog post, we’ll explore how HTML and SEO are interconnected and how you can use HTML to improve your website’s visibility and ranking in search engine results. We’ll also provide some tips and best practices for optimizing your HTML for SEO purposes.
So, if you’re interested in learning more about how HTML and SEO work together to drive traffic and improve your online presence, keep reading!
First of all, let’s dive into introduction of HTML for newbies here!
HTML (HyperText Markup Language)
HTML is a markup language used for structuring and formatting content on the web. It allows developers to create and structure web pages using various types of content, such as text, images, and videos, and to define the relationships between different pieces of content.
Here is a basic example of an HTML page:
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<title>My Web Page</title>
</head>
<body>
<h1>Welcome to my web page!</h1>
<p>Here is some detailed information about this page.</p>
<img src=”banner-image.jpg” alt=”An image”>
<a href=”https://www.example-website.com">Click here for more information</a>
</body>
</html>
Free platforms and Resources to Learning HTML!
• FreeCodeCamp
• W3schools
• Javatpoint
• Geeksforgeeks
• Studytonight
• Sololearn
• Tutorialspoint
• MDM web docs
I think that’s enough for HTML for now. Without any further ado let’s check what’s SEO in detail.
Search engine optimization (SEO)
Search engine optimization (SEO) is the practice of optimizing a website in order to improve its ranking in search engine results pages (SERPs) and increase the quantity and quality of its organic traffic. It involves a variety of techniques, including on-page optimization (making changes to the content and structure of a website to make it more attractive to search engines), off-page optimization (building high-quality links from other websites to your own), and technical SEO (optimizing the technical aspects of a website, such as its loading speed and mobile responsiveness).
There are many factors that can affect a website’s ranking in search engine results pages, including the relevance of the content on the website to the search query, the quality and quantity of links pointing to the website, the presence of keyword-rich titles and descriptions, and the overall user experience of the website. By optimizing these and other factors, a website can improve its ranking in search engine results pages and attract more organic traffic from users searching for relevant terms.
SEO is an important aspect of online marketing, as it can help a website reach a wider audience and increase its visibility and credibility. It is important for businesses and organizations to prioritize SEO in order to stay competitive in the online marketplace.
Some free learning resources for SEO:
• Google Search Central
• MOZ
• 12 SEO Best Practices That Everyone Should Follow
• 7 Steps to Create Search-Optimized Content
• How Search Works
See how HTML and SEO work together to scale your website
It’s also important to make sure that your website’s HTML code is well-structured and easy for search engines to crawl and index. This includes using proper heading tags, adding alt text to images, and using semantic HTML tags to give context to the content on your page.
In a January 2016 video hangout, Google official Jon Mueller stated that while correct HTML is not a direct ranking criterion, it can have an impact on how effectively Google scans your site. Here’s the quote:
This came up recently with the change of the guidelines, with regards to change made in the webmaster guidelines. We mentioned use valid HTML. The question here is Is the W3C Validation (Broken HTML) ranking factor or should we care about it?
It is not directly a ranking factor. It is not the sense that if your site is not using valid HTML, we will remove it from he index. Because I think we will have a pretty empty search results.
But there are a few aspects there that do come into play. On the one hand, a site with really broken HTML, something that we see really rarely, then it is really hard for us to crawl it and index the content because we can’t pick it up.
The other two aspects which are kind more in regards to structured data. Sometimes it is really hard to pick up the structured data when the HTML is broken completely. So you can’t easily use a validator for the structured data.
The other thing is in regards to mobile devices and cross browser support is if you have broken HTML then that sometimes really hard to render on newer devices.
John Mueller — January 29th, 2016
There are several ways in which HTML can impact SEO:
- HTML tags: Search engines use the information in HTML tags to understand the context and meaning of the content on a webpage. Using the proper HTML tags, such as title tags and header tags, can help search engines understand the structure and hierarchy of the content on your site, which can affect your ranking.
- Meta tags: HTML meta tags provide information about a webpage, such as its title and description, that may be used by search engines when displaying the page in search results. Properly using meta tags can help improve the click-through rate (CTR) of your website in search results, which can impact your ranking.
- Alt text: Adding alt text to images in HTML allows search engines to understand the content and context of images on your site. This can be especially useful for image search, which can drive additional traffic to your site.
- HTML structure: Search engines use the structure of a webpage, as indicated by HTML tags, to understand the content on the page and determine its relevance to a particular search query. A well-structured HTML page can help search engines understand the content and context of a page, which can affect its ranking.
5. Linking other reputable sites: Finally, building high-quality links from other reputable websites can also help improve your site’s ranking on search engines. This can be done through a variety of methods, such as guest blogging, creating valuable content that other sites will want to link to, and participating in online communities related to your industry.
Overall, using HTML properly can help improve the SEO of a website by making it easier for search engines to understand and index the content on the site.
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