Important tags that improve SEO

Abhay Jain
3 min readDec 9, 2020

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SEO stands for Search engine optimization. It is a set of rules for optimizing your website so that it can achieve higher rankings in search engines’ organic results.

Goals

  • It helps you understand what users are searching for online so that you can create high-quality content to satisfy their intent.
  • It helps you create a website that search engines can find, index, and understand its content.

Eventually, the marketers found that they need to communicate with the search engines to increase their rankings. And to do that, they need to speak the language of SEO. So here are some points that need to be kept in mind.

1. Title tag

The most important tag that you need to be familiar with when it comes to increasing your rankings. For any search engine to rank your website, it needs to know what your content is about, what each page is about, and what your site as a whole is about.

2. Meta description tag

The meta tag is an absolute must for anyone who is serious about their SEO. Think of the meta description as the synopsis on the back of a book. The title is the heading, and the meta description is the extra couple sentences of information that further describe what the content is about.

3. Header tags

Header tags are really easy to include in the content. They go right into the content itself. There are several different header tags. Depending on your format, you might have h1, h2, h3, and sometimes h4 or even h5. These will get progressively smaller and make for great headings and subheadings to organize your content.

4. Image alt tags

Search engines can’t read images, but search engines can read words. This means that to have a chance for your images to rank on Google, you need to include alt tags on all of your screenshots and photos. That way, when someone is searching the “Images” tab, they can still find your content.

5. Nofollow link tags

Nofollow tags tell search engines not to lend credence to the backlink that you’re creating for the website. In other words, linking to a website or piece of content would normally increase that website’s domain authority. But with a nofollow tag, it won’t. But don’t worry: The link will still work. It will still take whoever clicks on it to the appropriate place. It just won’t help the website’s SEO.

6. Links and anchor text tags

Whenever you want to include stats or images from different sources, you need to make sure that you’re giving credit where credit is due. Usually, a link to that website will suffice. Most people will just add the link and forget about the anchor text, which is unfortunate for SEO endeavors. And if you’re linking to a page on your own website, it will help your own domain authority because it keeps your content organized.

7. Canonical tags

The canonical tag is great for organizing your content and prioritizing one web page over a duplicate web page. Your website could have hundreds or thousands of duplicate pages. To solve this problem, you can use the canonical tag to specify which URL Google should pay attention to above all others.

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Abhay Jain

Developer with 3 yrs of industrial experience in developing scalable web applications.