SEO and web development cross over in a lot of ways, as the structure and build of a website can either have a positive or negative effect on SEO. So, it’s important for SEO agencies to work in tandem with web developers to create a website that looks great, is fast and meets all of Google’s criteria for a successful website to improve rankings. We’re here to discuss some of the components to boost your SEO with HTML optimisations, to improve your website as well as benefit from improved rankings.
Validate All HTML
A great place to start when it comes to HTML optimisations is to validate the HTML on the website. There are so many free tools to help you do this, and you can simply run your website’s URL through the checker, then it will flag either warnings or errors, and you (or your digital marketing agency Manchester based) can communicate this with web developers who can ensure that the code is syntactically correct and accessible, making it much easier for Google’s bots to crawl and index. The better formatted your code is, the easier it is for the bots to process, and therefore you are often rewarded in terms of rankings if the rest of your SEO strategy is well implemented.
Submit/Optimise Your HTML Sitemap
Something else you should do to boost your SEO in relation to HTML is to ensure that you have submitted and/or optimised your HTML sitemap. A sitemap is a file that you can submit to Google to provide information about the pages on the website and the overall structure, including the relationships between pages, to help make the crawling process more streamlined for the bots. Again, when a website is easier to crawl, often Google will reward the website as a result.
There is a very common SEO plugin called Yoast which helps with a range of different SEO implementations including meta data, however this also auto-generates a sitemap for you. You can then simply submit this in Google Search Console and provide Google with an additional tool to improve the crawling process. These generated sitemaps do tend to be well optimised anyway, however you should look out to ensure that the internal links and external URLs are structured properly, the root directory is clean and organised and ensure all pages are included.
Implement Structured Data
We know at this point that implementing HTML that makes it easier for Google to crawl will help with the SEO strategy, so another thing you can do is to implement structured data. Depending on the nature of your business, you can implement different types of structured data to tell Google useful information about your website and business. This could be opening hours and location information for local businesses, information about each of your products for ecommerce businesses, product ratings and so much more. Rather than Google having to identify useful information about your website itself, you’re providing the information in a clear and concise way to make your website easier to understand. There are so many different types of structured data available that a good SEO Manchester agency will be able to assist with and provide advice on, so do some research for your industry specifically and you can also take a look at what competitors are using by looking at page sources, to make sure you’re remaining competitive.
HTML Tags
HTML tags are a big part of SEO, as again you are highlighting important information across your website to help Google understand which parts of content are a priority. They can also help to provide context for elements on a website that can’t be crawled, such as images. There are plenty of different HTML tags used on websites, however these are three of the most beneficial for SEO.
Header Tags
Implementing correct header tags, along with a well thought out heading structure, is really important from an SEO perspective. This helps both users and search engines to navigate content and break down the page into clear sections. From Google’s perspective, it helps the bots to contextualise the content and understand how different sections relate to one another. Every page should have one <h1> tag, then throughout the page it should have <h2> and <h3> tags as a minimum, with more if required. Following the correct structure for your header tags is key to improving rankings.
Meta Description Tags
Meta descriptions are HTML elements that provide a short summary of a webpage to appear on SERPs. This is an opportunity from an SEO perspective to include keywords and provide useful information to Google about what is on each page. When you use a plugin like Yoast, it’s really easy to implement meta descriptions and the tags are automatically applied.
Alt Tags
Alt tags are a really important component of SEO, as Google’s bots can’t interpret images in any way, so you can add a short description of what appears in the image. Not only does this help visually impaired users to understand the images, but it also helps Google to see that the images are relevant to the information on a page.
