PPC Blog by Gordon Choi

In SEO, experts and webmasters would tell you content is the king. However, it always helps when you start off your first website by implementing HTML tags effectively. This seems to be very basic and isn’t any new SEO knowledge, but from time to time we often should be reminded. Below are the 5 tags that can influence your search engine rankings.

#1 Title Tag

The title tag is one of the most important on-page factors. It is what displays as the headline in the search engine result pages.

There are two ways in writing your title tag. The first is that if you want to create brand awareness, you will place your business name (or brand) towards the beginning of the title tag. Otherwise, your main keyword phrase should be used towards the beginning.

#2 Meta Description Tag

The meta description is important as it is the text search engines display when your web page comes up in the search results.

Your meta description should be a simple sentence (or short paragraph) that describes the nature of your website. For example, if your website is for business, it should give your potential customers a good idea of what products you sell or what services you provide. You should make proper use of punctuation and write for good readability.

#3 Header Tag

Good websites always make use of header tags in proper hierarchical ways.

The text of your web page will be given more weight by the search engines if you properly make use of header tags. It will work even better by using descriptive body text below the headers.

#4 Alt Tag

The alt tag serves as a good alternative in text format in describing the images on your website, when users browse your website with browsers that don’t support images, or your website happens to be unable to properly load image files.

Many webmasters believe that the alt tag is no longer being considered for ranking purposes by some major search engines, or its effect on ranking has been considerably reduced.

#5 Anchor Tag

Anchor tag is the link text on your web pages. As search engine spiders don’t like image links, when you have image links on your pages, you must also create the corresponding text links on one other place of your web pages.

The text in your anchor tag should be descriptive and tell the users where they will be shown after clicking on the link. For example, “click here” in your anchor tag is a good way to trigger user action, but it doesn’t tell where the users will be taken to after the action is triggered.

Warning

Lastly, after reading the above beginners may want to try stuffing their main keyword phrases multiple times in all 5 tags. This is never a good idea, as firstly, your website will surely be penalized by the search engines. Again in terms of usability, it is too important to have descriptive text in your tags for your users rather than being totally meaningless.

Posted in: Link Building, SEO