Having a website is essential for anyone who wants to communicate with their target audience, either in terms of business promotions or as an individual. However, it is not just enough to have a website nowadays, but you should also be visible in the highly competitive online space to attain your goals and objectives.

Search engine optimization is the key to ensure one's visibility in the internet space. There are various techniques and strategies used by the digital marketers to guarantee the search engine value of a website. Starting from scratch, a website developer should take care of HTML coding to make a website SEO-friendly.

HTML is primarily the coding standard used to make web pages. Search engines can pick up specific signals from various HTML elements. So, the designers and developers also need to be very careful while putting in the HTML elements to gain the maximum advantage.

Here are the major HTML elements to consider for SEO.

• Ht: The HTML title tag

Let's say that you have released 100 books on various topics, but had given them all the same title. How would the readers understand which books deal with what topic? In another similar instance, you wrote 100 books, all with different titles, but the titles are not descriptive enough to make others understand what each one is about. In both cases, the result is the same - you are leaving your audience confused!

Website developers and marketers can make the same mistake while putting HTML titles. Remember, HTML titles have always been and will always remain the key signal that tells the search engines what a page is all about. Poorly crafted titles may misrepresent the web page, and it may even give the search engine crawlers a wrong impression.

Therefore, when creating HTML titles, you must apply creative thinking. You must be able to describe the web page with just a few words. Since you will not have a lot of space, you must give a crisp yet clear title for the page.

• Hd: The Meta Description
  

The next big thing is meta description, which is one of the oldest supported elements of HTML. By creating an appropriate meta description, you can determine how the particular web page will appear in the search result list. Through this description, you can describe the contents of the page clearly to the audience and the search engines. Meta descriptions are akin to blurbs that you can find at the back of books.

Some Omaha SEO experts may argue that meta description is not actually a ranking factor and working on this will not really help your site to get a higher ranking. They think it is just a display factor which contributes to how you will look if you get listed on top due to the other SEO factors. This argument may be technically correct, but in reality, meta description has a lot of other advantages too.

An ideal meta description which contains the right keyword and precise information will instantly catch the user's eye. In fact, a well-crafted meta description can even help to "sell" the search engine results to the user. Appropriate meta description can achieve additional clicks and traffic to your site. So, in all sense, a meta description tag can be counted as a key success factor.

However, having a meta description tag will not guarantee that the description you put will be used as it is. Search engines may create various descriptions based on what they find most relevant to a particular query to list your website. In any case, having a good meta description can surely increase the odds on what you prefer the most to appear. Moreover, it is an easy task to accomplish.

• Hs: Structured data

You can surely take a big lead by directly telling the search engines what your content is about. Web sites now use different markup codes which make the site more acceptable to the search engines by correctly understanding the details, content, and structure of the pages.

This data structure approach translates into what Google refers to as "rich snippets." It is actually a search listing with bells and whistles to make it more attractive and instantly useful. An ideal rich snippet that you may come across are the reviews and ratings which you see with eye-catchy stars.

Even though the use of structured data may not directly contribute towards ranking, it is a supporting factor in success. A customized listing with rich snippet stands to gain more clicks and visits than the pages without it.

• Hh: Header tags

Do you see the headline of this article up on the top? Behind the screens, an HTML code is used to mark it as the header tag or the primary H1 tag. You can also see the subheadings of this, which are in fact H2 tags.

Header tags are used to mark the key areas and sub-sections of a particular web page. They are used both in marking text contents as well as other media. From the user point of view, these are the most prominent information they see on the screen. From search engine perspective, these Hh tags function as the clues as to what a page is all about. By adding the targeted keywords in the header tags, you stand to gain the maximum SEO advantage.

It is ideal to have a fair understanding of the above HTML tags to take the SEO advantage of these. However, this knowledge has also caused some of the developers and designer to go overboard and suffer losses. For example, some tried to put the entire program into the header tags to leverage the SEO value, but it only created a negative impact. Header tags are primarily for making the content easy for the users and search engines to interpret. So, the first thing any designer and developer should keep in mind is that all these tags are useful for SEO only if they reflect a logical structure of a page.

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