HTML Format to Improve Search Engine Visibility

HTML plays a big role in how your webpages are seen by people and search engine spiders. There are a few helpful tips in understanding what to do to get your HTML up to par so that it's crawled properly and ranked highly in search engines.

HTML Format to Improve Search Engine Visibility

Proper Meta Title

• Should contain the main keyword for the page, followed by a brief description of the page content
• Should be less than 65 characters
• Avoid using stop words such as: a, am, an, and, are, as, at, be, by, com, de, en, for, from, how, in, is, it, la, of, on, or, that, the, this, to, was, what, when, where, who, will, with, www, we, you, your, me, mine, my, i
• Your title tag should also be limited to the use of alphanumeric characters, hyphens, and commas

Proper Meta Description

• Should contain information about the page's content and persuade search engine users to visit your web site
• Between 25 and 35 words in length
• You may use Google's Keyword Tool: Click here

Proper Meta Keywords

• Should contain between 5-10 keywords or keyword phrases that are also found in page content

Use H1 Heading

• Should use at least one H1 heading tag for the search engines that examine it when scanning your site

The Minimum Content Length

• Pages must have 300 words

Have Global Links

• Each page of your site should contain links to every other page so search engine spiders can find every page. This is a critical step for the proper indexing and PageRank distribution of your site

Have Sitemaps

• It's important to use two site maps for your website--an XML version and a static version. The XML version can be created with search engine visibility's site map tool. The static version should sit on a static HTML page and contain links to every other page

Use robots.txt

• It's important that search engine spiders find your robots.txt file that guides spiders to pages and directories you want scanned and denies entry to protected areas of your site

Make Content Unique

• Because search engines treat web sites as a grouping of pages and not a single entity, each page on your site should be unique so that the tags and content differ between each page. Doing so increases the number of pages that will rank

Proper Image Tag (Alt)

• Each page should include a relevant image with a roper image tag. This makes your page more visually appealing and enables search engines to catalog the image
• If an image cannot be displayed (wrong src, slow connection, etc), the alt attribute provides alternative information. Using keywords and human-readable captions in the alt attributes is a good SEO practice because search engines cannot realy see the images. For images with a decorative role (bullets, round corners, etc) you are advised to use an empty alt or a CSS background image

Limit HTTP Requests

• Your page must have no more than 20 http requests. You can try reducing http requests through various methods such as using text instead of images, using css sprites, using data URIs instead of images, or combining several external files together into one

Recommended Page Size

• Recommended page size is under 33 Kb. This leads to a faster page loading time than average

Don't use underscores in URL

• Check your URL and in-page URLs for underscore characters. The general advise is to use hyphens or dashes (-) rather than underscores (_). Google treats hyphens as separators between words in a URL – unlike underscores

Make a Fan Page in Social Media

• Check if your page is connected to at least one of the most important social networks. Social signals are getting increasing importance as ranking factors for search engines because it leverages the social intelligence (via our interactions) to determine more accurate relevancy for searches. That's why connecting your website to a social network is a must nowadays to make sure your site is social enabled

You can also use this tool to quickly scan your website

By SEO Site Checkup

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