Markup Your Site for SEO

A simple aspect of SEO that is often overlooked, yet is vitally important, is having the correct HTML markup for your website. This simply means the use of the correct tags and HTML in the appropriate places. Using tags correctly will provide both SEO benefits, and should provide the user with the benefits of an easier to navigate website. It is something that should be done at the creation of a site, however if your site doesn’t have the correct HTML markup, don’t panic, as it shouldn’t take long to neaten up.

Try to Avoid <div> Tags

<div> tags are essentially meaningless tags that need to be defined by the editor. While they do have some use it is much easier and more SEO-friendly to use <h1>, <h2> etc. tags.

Use Header Tags Properly <h#>

By utilising header tags in the correct places you can show Google what are the important aspects of each page. For example, if your page is about “HTML Markup” use the following HTML towards the top of your page (wherever it should appear naturally) <h1>HTML Markup</h1>. This then shows the search engines that this is the main theme of your page. The <h1> tag should be kept quite similar to the page’s <title> tag.

If your page needs sub-headings, be sure to use the <h1>, <h2> and <h3> tags.

Utilise the Right Tags

Use tags like <strong> and <em> instead of, <b> and <i>, as the search engines interpret these tags better.

When forming a list, don’t simply add text with a <br> tag between each line. Add a proper ordered or unordered list. <ul> for unordered, and <il> for ordered.

Image HTML

A little known HTML fact is the importance of optimising your images for the search engines. Google uses images and the HTML surrounding an image to determine if the image matches what they believe the theme of the website is. Make sure you enter “alt” text in your image with your keyword. This is a good way to markup the HTML for your images:

<img src=”http://domain.com/image.html” alt=“these are the keywords I’m targeting” />

Be careful though, as Google will know when you are cheating! For example, if you optimise and image of a dog and use the alt text “cat”, Google will throw that image in the Google Image Search Results for “cat”. If it gets no clicks, Google will know it”s not an image of a cat and punish you.

Site Speed

Matt Cut’s recently announced at PubCon that site speed would be a huge SEO factor in 2010. So if you are running a slow (possibly flash-based) website, expect to be punished in the SERP’s in the next 12 months.

Here is a quick video by Google with some tips on improving your page speed. Also be sure to check out their website www.code.google.com/speed

As always, be sure to let me know if you have any comments or suggestions!