Hi! Today we are starting the series of useful articles about SEO-friendly content. Let’s start from scratch and pay attention to the most important step – the formatting. We’ll learn the first secret of writing SEO-friendly content and how to build its structure using HTML tags. And og course, if you need any help with HTML, our frontend developers can do it for you.
SEO Mechanisms
A Bit of History
HTML is a base of any web page. This language consists of tags and builds the page structure. So when you create the content in any kind of editor (it could be a visual editor or you see full HTML code), your texts, images, and other elements are ranged on the page and get special formatting according to the used tags.
What Google Says
Googlebot scans the web pages and ranges them depending on the quality and relevance of your content. Google has specific requirements for the content structure. If we ignore them, we can be ignored by Google and even don’t get into Google index. Nobody wants to be out of the game, so, let’s cope with it!
5 Elements of SEO-Friendly Structure
SEO-Friendly Title
A title is a name of the post, message, or page. It is one of the first factors that influences Google bot’s attitude to your content. The title should be clear and include the keywords. It shouldn’t be long (up to 100 symbols) but represent the idea of your text. Eye-catching, interesting, and powerful titles attract more visitors to your website and help the search engines understand whether your content is relevant and SEO-friendly.
How it looks in action
When the users search something on the Internet, they get the list of relevant websites, which meet their queries. The blue-coloured names of found web pages, which they see in the search results, are the titles. Looking at them, the user decides, if he wants to click the website or not. Also, we can see the titles while opening the websites. They are the names of our tabs in a browser.
How to add it via tags
You can edit your title via HTML tags. Paste the name of you article (post or page) instead of the words between the tags. The title tag is placed inside the pair <head></head> tag, nearly at the beginning of the page HTML code:
<head>
<title>your content title</title>
</head>
SEO-Friendly Meta Tags
Meta tags are responsible for the keywords and description. You should put them into the specific part of HTML code.
Your chosen keywords should be used not only in the post. It’s better to help the search engines indicate them via correct meta tags. The description is another important part of the content structure. It should include the keywords and describe the content of your web page.
How it looks in action
Keywords give search engines the necessary information. The description itself is also visible for Internet users. When they are looking for some content and get the list of search results, they can see not only blue-colored titles of the web pages. The description of each web page appears below the green-colored link to this web page and includes some brief summary of the content (look at the picture above).You can add some powerful call to action to your description and make the users interested in your content. Also, show the truthful content idea. Don’t try to cheat your visitors. In such case, the Googlebot can rate your content like irrelevant.
How to add them via tags
Keywords and the description are added via the meta tags. Place them after the title tag. Paste your keywords instead of the words in quotes (quotes should be saved).
<title>your title</title>
<meta name=”keywords” content=”keyword 1, keyword 2, …”>
<meta name=”description” content=”add here your description”>
SEO-Friendly Headings
There are several levels of headings in content structure: first, second, third, fourth, fifth, and sixth. There could be more levels, but usually 6 levels are enough. You can add them via tags h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6 and should go one by one.
How it looks in action
Headings are usually pointed with the larger font size or in bold. They help you to focus the reader’s attention on the most important key thought in content. Headings are also helpful for the search engines. They should include the keywords.
How to add them via tags
Use the tag of necessary heading level to put headings into your content. Paste the headings instead of the words between the tags:
<h1>you first level heading</h1>
<h2>you first level heading</h2>
SEO-Friendly Paragraphs
Paragraphs are very important for the content writing. They build its structure. If your text is separated into logical parts and has well-readable font type, you win a great chance to gain success.Your visitors will be grateful to you, and the search engines will understand your main idea easily. Paragraphs should include numbered and unnumbered lists to be structured. Don’t use too much bold, italic, and underline font type. They are used only for pointing the most important things. Try to avoid CAPS and text badly-readable colors.
How it looks in action
Your paragraphs should include up to 7% keywords, but not more.The time is running, and Google becomes more clever. Now it values the relevance of the content not only by the keywords. Now the LSI words that surround your keywords are used like the criterium of quality. These are the words related to your keywords. That’s why, first of all, create the content for people, not for robots.
How to add them via tags
HTML includes the specific tag for separating content into paragraphs. It is used in any place of HTML code in “body” part:
<p>your text</p>
SEO-Friendly Images
Google can’t see your images like a man. But! You can help it to understand what on the picture is. How? – It’s very simple. You should name your images using their sense and even the keywords. And that is not all. You should also use the alt-text.
How it looks in action
Look at the funny picture above. Let’s imagine that you are writing the article about dogs. So, you can name your image like “dog” or “pug” in the image title. And what about the alt text? – You can place there something like “ the funny pug” or “a dog wants the cookie”.
Alt-text helps the search engines understand what on the picture is. The alternative text is helpful for the users. When the browser doesn’t load the picture correctly, the alt text appears instead of the image and explains its content.
If you use title attributes, you can say what on the picture is. A title is also helpful for people with reduced capabilities.How to add them via tags
You can use the special HTML tags for placing the images. If you see the self-closing tag <image> and the link to your image, look at the end of this text. You’ll see something like “your image title.png” (.png, .jpg, .gif – are the image formats). So, place your title instead of the text in the place of “your image title”. Alt-text is added after alt= in quotes.
<img src=”your image title.png” alt=”your alt text”>
If you use some visual editor, you can put the title and the alt-text into specific fields while adding the image.
Now you already know some of the most important rules for writing SEO-friendly content. Of course, it’s not all you need, because Google also take a clear website code into consideration. And if you want to have the professional and proper website, we’ll do it for you with great pleasure. Just press, ‘Askt Questions” below and drop us a line.
It’s only the beginning of our excursion. In the next releases, you’ll learn how to make the keyword research and other Google SEO features.
Wish you success and inspiring content!