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HTML SEO Basics

Simple SEO Tips

Entire books have been written on SEO best practices, but a few simple steps will go a long way. If you can control your HTML, make sure you have the following tags present and containing relevant data.

Title Tag


                <TITLE>… </TITLE>

The title tag is critical as it can be used by search engines in their results pages.

H1 Tag


                 <H1>… </H1>

You should only have one H1 tag on your page and it should be very close to your title tag if not the same.

H2 Tag


                 <H2>… </H2>

You can have more than one H2 tag but use it as a sub-title or content delineator. This will help the search engine understand the different categories in your content.

Also look at the META tags in the header section of the HTML source. These can be used by social aggregation sites.

META Title tag


                <meta name="title" content="…" />

This tag should contain your title as well.

META Description tag


                <meta name="description" content="…" />

In the META description, I usually put the content of my H2 tags, or keywords.

Things may vary depending on your platform or how much of your source code you control. But at a minimum, follow the above steps. If you don't control the source code, don't worry about it and focus instead on writing stellar content! If it's incredible and well presented, people will find you!

Also, use the mentioned trick of dropping keywords in a search engine and look at the source code of the resulting pages. You can learn a lot by looking at how the top contenders are formatting their source code.

Image tag

One more tip, from Jason McDonald, author of SEO Fitness Workbook. Jason emphasizes the importance that every piece should have an image appropriately named, with a sensible "title" and "alt" tag. This is an interesting tip because we often don't bother naming the image in a readable way or we don't bother with the alt or title tags (at least I didn't). These could be seen by the indexing engine as bad content or even spam.

Here is an example of one of my HTML IMG tags (notice the name, "alt" and "title" tag values):

Proper image and alt tags use

Google Search Console

Last step is to drop your updated URL into the Google Search Console so it can be indexed ASAP!

Thanks for reading! And please share this article with a friend or colleague or two :-)

Best!
Manuel Amunategui,
Curator @ amunategui.github.io and ViralML