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Web pages are made up of HTML. In the last guide on understanding HTML for SEO, we looked at how to look at a webpage and check the various tags on that page.
In this guide we’ll look at the important tags for SEO and the various roles they play. Try opening a webpage (your own would be a good idea), viewing the website source and searching for these different tags to examine what they are set to.
Technically not a tag, the URL is the webpage address, for example
https://www.myclinicwebsite.com/our-coventry-dental-clinic
The homepage will simply be the website address. The other pages will contain a slash followed by the page address, in this case “dentist-in-coventry”, which is called the slug.
There are conflicting opinions on whether optimising the URL makes any difference, with the general consensus being that it doesn’t.
My opinion is to ensure your URLs make sense and aren’t meaningless defaults like “/general-template-4” (looking at you, Squarespace). If you do this they will be optimised by default, e.g. “/our-coventry-dental-clinic”, “invisalign-coventry”, etc., and there is no need to consider it any further. They will be sensical to the user and if there is any optimisation benefit to be had then you will have it.
If you change a URL, you should do a 301 redirect to tell Google that the page URL has changed and not just disappeared.
<title>Title Tag Content</title>
The title tag appears in the browser tab. It is one of the key optimisation points on the page. It should be 30-60 characters long and contain your main keywords for the page, e.g. Our Coventry Dental Clinic or Dentist Clinic in Coventry.
The title tag and meta tag appear in Google search results (see below) along with the page image.
The title tag is sometimes called the SEO Title.
<meta name="description" content="Meta Description Content">
The meta description tells Google what the page is about, and also appears in Google search results (see above).
Although some people think it no longer matters for SEO, we can see from the example above that it does. I typed in “Coventry dental clinic” and we can see that Google has put in bolds the words “Coventry” and “dental” in the meta description of the page to show that it matches my search. This is called a local justifier and goes to show that keywords in the meta description are important.
The meta description should be 150-160 characters long. It is also sometimes called the meta tag or SEO description.
Because both the title tag and meta description are displayed in Google search results, they should be optimised for click-through rate as well as SEO. Make sure they contain your main keywords for the page, but also that what you say entices searchers to click through to your site.
<h1>h1 Tag Content</h1>
The h1 tag is the title of your page which actually displays on the page and, like the title tag (which doesn’t display on the page), tells Google and users what the title of your page is and what it is about.
The h1 tag is arguably the most important optimisation on your page, and should contain your page keywords. There should be exactly one h1 tag on every page, no more and no less.
Note there is a big drawback when using Squarespace and some other website builders in that it doesn’t separate semantics from content, which means all h1 tags on your site will look the same, all h2s will look the same and so on. People design pages with the tags that look the best thinking it’s a purely stylistic choice, without realising their SEO importance.
<h2>h2 Tag Content</h2>
<h3>h3 Tag Content</h3>
Etc.
The h2-h6 tags are degrees of subheading, so h2 is a subheading, h3 is a sub-subheading, and so on.
Your page should be broken up with a hierarchy of subheadings, so an h1 tag for the title, h2 tags for subtitles, some of which may be broken into sub-subtitles with h3 tags, some of which may be broken into sub-sub-subtitles which h4 tags, and so on.
Creating your page in this way gives Google a clear and understandable overview of what your page is about. They should liberally contain your keywords without overdoing it or Google may consider the page “over optimised” i.e. you’re trying too hard to rank for a certain term rather than providing useful information.
So a page on Invisalign in Coventry might contain subheadings like “what is Invisalign”, “how much does Invisalign cost”, “how long does Invisalign take”, “Invisalign FAQ” and so on, showing Google this is a useful resource for Invisalign searches.
<p>Paragraph Content</p>
The p or paragraph tag is simply the tag used for the main body text of your page.
Your keywords should appear naturally in your paragraph text, without keyword stuffing.
<a href="page-to-link-to" target="_blank" rel="nofollow">Link Anchor Text</a>
A or anchor tags are the links on your page, whether to other pages on your site or to external websites.
The link anchor text is the text that you will actually click on and which will be highlighted or underlined on the page to show that it is a link. The anchor text is a key optimisation point for the page the link is pointing to. So for example if you have a sports injury clinic page, you want the anchor text on both your website and any other websites which link to that page to say “sports injury clinic”, showing Google that is what the page is about.
The target attribute tells Google whether to open the link in a new tab or the same one. If there is no target attribute or it is set to “_self” then it will open in the same tab. If it is set to “_blank” it will open in a new tab. The rule is that if you’re staying on the same website, stay in the same tab. Going to a different website, open a different tab.
rel=”nofollow” or rel=”sponsored” tells Google that this is not an organic link to a 3rd party site based on the merit of the 3rd party site’s content, but that the link has been paid for. Google therefore won’t give you as much kudos for the link as if these were not present (called a “dofollow” link, although there is no such thing as rel=”dofollow”, it’s just left out). You’ll want to check any backlinks you get from 3rd party sites to ensure they are dofollow links wherever possible.
Be sure to include links to other pages on your site in your website text, using the keywords for the page you’re linking to as the anchor text.
<img decoding="async" src="image-address" alt="Alt Tag Content">
The image address or path tells the browser where to find the image, for example https://mywebsite.com/picture-of-dentist.jpg.
There are varying schools of thought around whether keywords in the path make any difference and whether you should change the names of your images before uploading to include your keywords.
The alt tag (technically an alt attribute) is there to tell people using screen readers what the image is about. E.g. “man sitting on park bench”. Most SEOs will use these to sneak in optimisations e.g. “man sitting on park bench before going to dentist in Coventry”, to the annoyance of visually impaired people. Put your keywords in if they work naturally, but the most important thing is that they are set, so Google considers your page accessible.
<figure>
<img .... >
<figcaption>Image Caption</figcaption>
</figure>
The image caption makes use of a <figcaption> tag, which goes in a <figure> tag which will also contain an image using either an <img> or <srcset> tag.
Because it goes on the page, for me it is a clearer way of telling Google what the image is about, and a good place to include keywords. Google will deduce (although Google is increasingly “looking” at images with AI and figuring it out for itself) that you not only have content about your keywords, but images too.
<meta property="og:image" content="address-of-image">
Technically this is not an optimisation but an important tag to be able to troubleshoot.
The page image is the image which is displayed in search results (see above) and when the page is shared on social media. There is not really an accepted term for it. Technically it is the open graph image. Facebook calls it the featured image, and other platforms call it the SEO image or social media image. Internally at MYCO we call it the share image.
Note that the page image does not have an alt tag and cannot have a caption.
There is a lot more to good on-page SEO than simply optimising these tags with your keywords, but this is a fundamental step to good content and technical SEO.
If you have more questions about SEO, we’ll be happy to help. Feel free to reach out, come and ask a question in Free Webinar Friday, or book a free strategy call.
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