Structuring your HTML to reflect your page content is another important part of improving your website’s SEO. The title, meta description, and all of the heading tags provide the most important power for SEO. Think from a search engine standpoint really quick. Obviously, the page title is pretty important, as it will be showing up in the search results. The meta description is the same story, as it will also appear in the search results. Heading are extremely crucial to search engines because they structure your page content. Let’s break them down.
HTML Title Optimization
The page title is important for search engine optimization in a number of ways. Like I said above, generally, the page title is displayed in the search results. Since search engines want relevant results, they will probably want your page title to contain or be related to the user’s search term(s). Another reason why a relevant page title is a good idea is because non-search engines also use them. So, if you are trying to incorporate social media like Facebook, they also might use the page title. Finally, some users still bookmark pages. Bookmarks typically use the page titles. So, the user will be able to easily find that favorite article on your website much easier the second time.
Meta Description
The meta description is important for SEO in many of the same reasons that the page title is. It shows up in the search results and other websites might use that text when linking to you. If you have ever heard of an elevator speech for a business, your meta description is pretty much just that. It’s an abstract of your content and your chance to entice visitors into viewing your awesome content. Meta descriptions are longer, which makes them more specific. However, it also means you might run into more trouble. If search engines can’t match your meta descriptions terms with the terms inside you main content, they might not display your website in the search results. They do this because it looks like you are stuffing content in the meta description that the page isn’t really about.
HTML Headings
Headers are the best place to broaden your specific keywords and to restate them. So, if you had a term like tutorials, you could restate how important that word is by placing it in a heading. Now we both know HTML has up to 6 different headings, but what you might not know is that search engines treat them differently. It seems natural that an h1 tag should carry more weight than an h6 tag. So, be sure to put your most important terms in the more important tags.
Always remember that when you are crafting your title, description, or headers to use content that is going to be in your main content. Using these tags on a term that isn’t inside the main content is essentially wasting a term, which we certainly do not want to happen.
HTML is fun!