HTML optimisation is a critical part of SEO and can be overlooked, which overall can affect your rankings. It involves making various adjustments to your website’s HTML code, along with other aspects of SEO, to boost your rankings on the search engine results pages (SERPS). If it can have positive effects on your website, it leaves no room to make these changes to your SEO strategy. HTML optimisation can contribute in many ways, such as improving the user experience, page rankings, organic traffic and conversion rates.
When it comes to SEO, in order to see the results you want, you need to ensure all things that Google likes are being taken into consideration and maintained, such as the content on your website being updated regularly and so on. They all work hand in hand to give you the best possible results for specific keywords. Therefore, this blog will go on to explain how you can boost your SEO with HTML optimisation.
Are HTML optimisation and SEO the same?
SEO and HTML optimisation are two separate processes that essentially work hand in hand, both reaching the same goal of ranking well and providing an optimal user experience, bringing more traffic to your website.
The main differences are as follows:
- While HTML focuses on optimising the code for the website, SEO aims to increase a website’s ranking on SERPs.
- SEO techniques include building a website profile for relevant keywords through optimisation of many things, such as content, alt tags, link building and metadata. While HTML is changing or updating code.
- SEO is more of a constant and long-term thing that needs to be maintained.
- Overall, the goal of HTML optimisation and SEO is to increase website visibility and traffic. While SEO focuses on content and interactions, HTML optimisation works on the website’s structural foundation.
How to conduct HTML Optimisation
A good place to start is validating your website’s HTML. There are many services and free tools that are accessible at your fingertips. It’s that easy, especially for beginners. You simply enter your website’s URL through the checker and here it will go through your whole website and flag all the warnings and existing errors that need to be fixed yourself or communicate this back to if you are an SEO Manchester agency.
If you decide to work alongside a professional agency, they can ensure that the code is syntactically correct and accessible, making sure that Google crawls and indexes your website. As agencies have more experience with coding, this will ensure it is done correctly and fixed without creating more mistakes. However, if you are confident and interested in the world of coding, then you can give it a go and keep refreshing until the errors are all surpassed.
Sitemap
Making sure your HTML sitemap has been submitted and/or optimised is something else you should do to improve your SEO concerning HTML. To help the bots’ crawling process run more smoothly, you can submit a sitemap file to Google that contains details about the pages on your website as well as the overall structure, including the relationships between pages. Once again, Google frequently rewards websites that are simpler to crawl.
You might have already heard of Yoast, a well-used SEO plugin that assists with various SEO implementations, such as metadata, and additionally creates a sitemap automatically. Then, all you have to do is submit this through the Google Search Console, giving Google another tool to help with its crawling and improve your rankings. Although the generated sitemaps are generally well-optimized, you should still check to make sure all pages are included, the root directory is tidy and organised, and the internal and external URLs are structured correctly.
Structure your Data
By now, we know that by implementing HTML, Google loves it and will crawl it but with the help of your current or ongoing SEO strategy, another thing you can consider doing is implementing structured data.
There are many types of structured data you can implement that are useful for Google to understand and determine if your content is useful to the user. The type of data you use is dependent on the nature of your business. This could include your business’s opening hours (if you have a physical store), a location that is perfect for local SEO, or a description of every one of your products or services. Rather than having to spend the time to figure it out and decide whether it’s good, bad, or useful and whether you will be rewarded for it, you are making your website easy to read and speeding up this process.
If you don’t know where to start and you aren’t entrusting this task to a digital marketing agency in Manchester, then you could do some digging using free tools and see what your competitors are writing on their pages. Sometimes this can be trial and error and as Google is constantly evolving what they want from sites, this research and adaptations should be done regularly.
HTML Optimisation Tags
HTML tags play a major role in SEO because, once more, they help Google identify which content sections are more important than others by drawing attention to key information throughout your website. They can also assist in giving context to website elements—like images—that are unable to be crawled. These three HTML tags are the most advantageous for SEO out of all the ones that are used on websites.
Header Tags
In terms of search engine optimisation, it is crucial to use appropriate header tags in conjunction with a carefully considered heading structure. This makes the content easier to navigate and divides the page into distinct sections for search engines as well as users. According to Google, it facilitates the bots’ ability to contextualise the content and comprehend how various sections relate to one another.
Each page should have a single <h1> tag. If more are needed, additional <h2> and <h3> tags should be added throughout the page. To increase rankings, make sure your header tags follow the right format and are optimised with keywords.
Meta Descriptions Tags
One-paragraph summaries of a webpage that show up in search engine results pages are known as meta descriptions. These usually consist of between 150 and 160 characters to ensure they all fit on SERPS. From an SEO standpoint, this is an opportunity to add keywords and give Google valuable insight into the content of each page. Applying tags automatically and implementing meta descriptions is a breeze when you use a plugin like Yoast.
Alt Tags
As mentioned before, because Google’s bots are unable to comprehend images in any way, alt tags—which allow you to add a brief description of the image’s content—are an extremely important part of SEO. This not only makes the images easier for visually impaired users to understand, but it also makes it easier for Google to determine that the images are pertinent to the content on a page.