The Basics of Using HTML Elements for SEO Success

by Jet Digital Marketing
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Using HTML elements can both benefit your SEO and help the structure of your page, so it is in compliance with Google's best practices and in compliance with HTML principals. Using them effectively can boost your SEO and can provide a great base for your website to build off of.

First you need to have a great keyword list to target for your website, which you can develop using our blog article 6 Steps to Find the Right Keywords to Target for your SEO Strategy.

Then, you need to implement these keywords correctly into your HTML elements. In order to win with your HTML elements, you need to create elements in a way that is standard throughout most webpages, and then you need to know how to implement keywords throughout your HTML elements so that you are not using your keywords to heavily on one webpage or blog article. If you use your keywords to heavily on one page, then Google might find your webpage and tag it as spam, or penalize your website for keyword stuffing. Google’s algorithm has become increasingly good at figuring out when someone is trying to intentionally put keywords in their webpage to show up for certain terms, so it is a balancing act of making sure you are following their policies.

In this blog we will go over how to create basic HTML elements and how to add keywords to those elements correctly.

How To Target Keywords on your Webpage

You should pick about 2-3 keywords to target within each webpage or blog article. These keywords might include one search term, and a variation of that search term that includes synonyms to your main search term.

You should use each search term once within your article, or synonyms of that search term throughout the titles, H1 tags, and paragraphs, etc.

Consider linking these search terms or keywords to relevant articles or webpages within your site. This is called “inbound linking.” To develop a great inbound linking strategy, talk to an SEO specialist on what the best way to go about this is.

Linking your search terms to outbound sites is also a good idea, but with caution. Make sure you are linking to credible sources, using the “nofollow” attribute on your links, and using the “open in new window” attribute as well. For more information on a great outbound linking strategy, talk to an SEO specialist.

How to Create Optimized Title Tags

A title tag is just a fancy way of saying the title of your blog article or webpage. Make sure the title of your webpage is 60 characters or less, and includes your targeted keywords. The reason it has to be 60 characters or less is because this will be the title that will be shown on Google search results, and Google search results only allows room for your title to have 60 characters. This also is true when someone shares your website or blog article. You want your title tag to be optimized with keywords and to be able to be shown in entirety when it is shared on social media or when it shows up in a search result.

You should choose your main keyword or search term to be in your title tag. If you do not have a main keyword or search term, but have various terms you want to focus on, then choose one of those search terms. Only mention this search term once, and make sure not to mix up the word order of that search term.

How to Create an Optimized Meta Description

A meta-description is the area of the webpage that describes your blog article or webpage. This will not be shown on your webpage, but will be shown on Google search results and when someone shares your article on social media. Where do you input information for the meta-description? Look for a tab when developing your webpage or blog article that says something like “publishing” or if you are on a Wordpress site, look for the plugin elements on your webpage editor that allows you to input SEO elements.

Your meta-description should also include a call-to-action, so that when users see it shown on a search result or on social media, they get an idea for what your webpage is about and how they can take action and communicate with your webpage. If you still are not quite sure where to input your meta-description, call one of our SEO specialists and we can walk you through it! Most people make their meta-description between 150-160 characters.

You should pick one keyword string or search term to mention in your meta-description. This could be a search term that is a synonym to your main keyword string, or it could be a search term that is supplemental to your main keyword string. Do not mention the same keyword in the meta-description that you mention in the title tag. Try to keep them in a variation using synonyms if possible.

How to Create Optimized Header Tags

Header tags are your H1, H2, H3—and so on—elements. You use these when highlighting secondary titles on your webpage or blog article. These titles are not as important as your title tag, but represent different sections of your webpage or blog article. For instance if you are creating a checklist for a blog article, these tags would be used to highlight the titles of the checklist points before going to further details about one checklist point in the paragraph below it.

With H1 tags, make sure you do not overuse them. This header tag is just for your main content heading, so you should only have one. For your H2 and H3 tags, use these sparingly as well for subheadings on a page. Most of the content will be in paragraph tags. Look above at the section titled “how to target keywords on your webpage” for more information on how to implement keywords throughout these tags.

Using HTML elements is a great way to effectively format a page so that your webpage is readable to search engines, to the user, and structured effectively for the web.