Sometimes we’re in such a rush to publish a website, we neglect common issues that may hurt search visibility. An HTML tuneup can help correct these problems and may give a much needed boost to the website’s traffic.
Even if a site is established and generating income, there may be money left on the table if these issues are not addressed. If you want to maximize performance, and do it in an area that you control, a website tuneup will surely help.
Commonly ignored HTML issues
There are many issues that need addressing with the HTML code of a website. Here is a short list:
- Meta Tag usage
- Navigation placement
- Headings and Paragraph tag usage
- Sitemap usage
- Sidebar and Footer placement
How to improve in these areas
With meta tags, make sure there’s a title, description and keyword tag. Although many will say the keyword tag is worthless to search engines like Google, it will not hurt to include it. There are many search engines that still use them.
How these tags are used is also critical. It’s important that your keyword/s are included in all three tags mentioned above. But avoid duplication of tags in the title or keywords. In the description, try to have it at the beginning and at the end.
Other tags to inspect is the robots tag. Make sure it says “index,follow”. This insures search engines are not restricted to indexing the page/site. I’ve also noticed some sites using the DC.title meta tag. This may help with accessibility and improving indexing. Here is some background about the DC.title tag
Few people know the importance of coding and placing the navigation correctly. Main nav or menu items must be placed in list tags ol or ul. And li tags placed within those two main tags. Also these tags must be place directly below the body tag for optimum semantics. These two fixes are critical for proper indexing. If the nav item must be displayed from left to right, I wrote an article on how to display a list inline using CSS.
Something I was ignorant of until recently is how to use and place Heading tags. These are H1 to H6 elements. H1 should be used once. I am aware that some search engines ignore it if you use this multiple times, but this is incorrect.
Headings below the h1 should be placed appropriately below the tags just above. In other words, H2 tags should be place in the code/text below the h1. Never above. H3 must be placed below h2. Lower tags are sub headings of higher tags, therefore they offer support to the point outlined in the higher heading.
Content, regardless of text, audio or video, must be enclosed by Paragraph tags. This is another essential ingredient to proper semantics. This increases and improves indexing and readability by multiple technologies. In other words; a wireless gadget can now parse the information correctly.
I once frowned on sites that placed sitemap links on the site. I didn’t understand it. I thought the nav takes care of this. Forgive my ignorance, because I quickly realized that this helps search engine index your site better and gives you control over what they can index.
Just like the navigation, placement of the sidebar and footer is also a common issue. You want to help the search engines as much as possible. That means your main content must be read sooner than any other site wide content (except navigation).
Therefore the content you hope to rank for, like an article cannot be set with a priority below these. So the Sidebar and Footer must be placed below the main content. And styling can be used to adjust these to display nicely to the user.
Closing
With these HTML tuneup tips, you should be able to see an improvement in your websites search engine visibility. In some cases, Google will add your Navigation to the SERPs. It will also improve your accessibility across various types of devices and technology.
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