Today, most of the world often surfs the Internet, but many people don't really know how web pages work. One of the main foundations of web pages is HTML. This is a brand language which is used to translate the information we want to display on the web and, together with other tools such as JavaScript and CSS, set the standard for the construction of web pages.
It is well known that the good use of HTML tags in web pages is crucial for organic positioning. This is because the search engines like Google use the W3C as an additional factor in their positioning algorithm But what is W3C?
What is W3C?
The W3C or World Wide Web Consortium is an international consortium that has set standards for how HTML tags should be structured and added to a website. Failure to comply with these standards hinders the task of crawling and readability of the page and therefore its indexing.
Most websites do not fully comply with this consortium, including not only small websites, but also very large websites such as Amazon or even Google itself. That is why this time we wanted to talk about what are the most common problems when structuring the HTML of your website and that can affect SEO.
Headings
One of the most important tags in a web site are the headers, or "headers. This tag is used to give a title or subtitle to a section and explain what it will contain. In addition, it not only serves to make it easier for users to read, it is also used by Google to know what is the content of the page and be able to categorize it better.
This label must follow a system of "matryoshkas" that is, they must follow a hierarchical order. We can use up to 6 types of headers, using the tag <h> accompanied by a number, from 1 to 6. Each one of them has a size, being <h1> the largest and <h6> the smallest.
One of the most common mistakes when using these tags is not structuring them correctly. If you want to add a smaller header to your <h1>you cannot directly use a <h4>but you have to use a <h2>. That is, they must follow the order of sizes.
To show this more visually, the image above shows a correct use of structuring this tag.
Alternative texts
This is one of the most common errors in web pages when it comes to including images, specifically alternative texts. Within the image tags there is an attribute called "alt" which serves to give a brief description of what is contained in that image <img src="”url”" alt=""Description." de la imagen”>.
The most direct purpose is that the bots know what is inside the image and can categorize it more easily, thus making it easier to achieve a correct indexing and therefore a better positioning.
The other purpose has to do with accessibility for the visually impaired. There are a number of very useful applications for these people that read aloud the content of a website as they navigate through it, and when they reach an image they read this alternative description.
Meta tags
First of all, what are metatags? They are tags that are used to provide information to the search engines about the content or how to interact with a URL, and the content of these is not displayed to the user. These tags should go inside the HTML header (), along with scripts and CSS formatting files.
There are several different metatags, but in this post we are going to focus on 3 of them: titles, metadescriptions and robots.
Titles
Of the meta tags, this is perhaps the most important and basic. With this tag, you tell crawlers what content they will find within the URL. Each title within the web must be unique and descriptive, and should always be 65 characters or less.
Apart from providing information to search engines, it is also the title that is displayed in search results or SERPs.
An important SEO tip is that the title should not be the same as the h1 of the page, but both have to show similar information, so that there is consistency. In addition, it has to attack the main keyword for which we want to position the page.
Description
The Metadescription, , complements the previous tag, because if one serves to condense in a title what you will find inside the URL, this one shows a brief description of the contents.
Like the title, the description is also displayed in the search results.
A good description is around 155 characters long, it explains the contents in a condensed and brief way, without overusing keywords and, of course, it must be original and unique.
This tag is very useful not only to summarize what is inside the page, but also to highlight the advantages of our service over the competition in the case of an online business and attract more potential users.
Robots
This meta tag is used to tell crawler bots, such as Google's own, how to interact with each URL. This tag must follow a syntax like this:
In the attribute "name" we must specify that it is robots. And in the "content" attribute we must specify how we want the crawling bot of the search engine, such as Google or Bing, to proceed with the page.
In the "content" attribute we can specify several actions, but the most important are:
- Index: we want this URL to be indexed in search engines.</p> <p>Noindex: we do not want the URL to be indexed.
- Follow: we indicate to the crawlers that they can follow the links of that URL.
- Nofollow: crawlers that will not follow any link within that URL.
- None: we indicate that we do not want neither the URL to be indexed nor the links within it to follow.
There are more attributes that we can use with the robots meta tag, but these are the most important ones.
And why do we want to prevent the crawler from indexing one of my URLs? It may sound counterproductive, but there are pages that are not worth search engines having in their indexes, such as the cart page or the login page, as well as avoiding duplicate content problems if we have two pages with very similar content.
The main objective is to make the crawler bot crawl only the pages of interest completely and show the user those that we want or will be relevant.
The value of HTML for SEO
Before finishing, we want to clarify that it does not mean that just because you do not meet these standards your website will fail (in the end even Google's own website has these problems). But of course the fact of complying with them brings important benefits for organic positioning and therefore we recommend that you work this section of your website.
To solve these problems we do not need to review the entire code of the web, as it would take us many hours. There are different modules or plugins that we can use in our CMS to help us solve these problems.</p> <p>The moral or thought to extract, is that it is very important that we take care of our web pages internally. Because, although it may not seem so, it can affect the positioning of this, and therefore the number of users who enter.
The tags we have shown are the most basic ones that should be well optimized, but they are not the only ones. There are many more tags that misused can affect other aspects, such as the internationalization of a website or multi-languages, duplicate content, even the way the crawler bot can examine and load your website.
That's why, in the face of these ordeals and many more, we have a team specialized in finding these problems, solving them and optimizing your website to get better results. Improve your web positioning, your ads in search engines, your appearance in social networks and many more aspects of your business by improving your website with Geotelecom.
