The periodic table of SEO success factors part 7 HTML Code

In these series of articles I have explained first the generalities of the periodic table of SEO success factors and then two columns of the “elements”. In this article I will explain the third column which is HTML Code.

HTML is the underlying code used to create web pages. Search engines can pick up ranking signals from specific HTML elements. Below are some of the most important HTML elements to achieve SEO success.

Ht: HTML Title Tag

If you have written 50 different books but gave all of them the same title. How would someone differentiate that those books are about different topics.

Or in another scenario you wrote 50 books with different titles but the titles weren’t descriptive enough. How would anyone know, at a glance, what the books were about?

HTML titles have always been and remain the most important HTML signal that search engines use to understand what a page is about. Bad titles on your pages are like having bad book titles in the examples above. In fact, if your HTML titles are deemed bad or not descriptive, Google changes them.

Hd: The Meta Description Tag

The meta description tag allows you to suggest how you’d like your pages to be described in search listings. In the example of the book if the title tag is like the title of the book the description tag is like the description of the book at a glance behind the book. So, you have to work for it to craft a good description which would encourage the visitors to click on your link and visit your site.

A meta description that contains the keywords searched for (in bold) may catch the user’s eye. A well-crafted meta description may help ‘sell’ that result to the user. Both can result in additional clicks to your site. As such, it makes sense for the meta description tag to be counted as a success factor.