Obviously, we’re only going to be able to scratch the surface here, but here are some of the key tags and ideas to pay attention to while you’re doing markup:
Title <title>
- Use short, descriptive titles. (70-90 characters.)
- Keywords at start of title.
- Include brand if appropriate.
Page Description
<meta name="description" content="Describe the page as accurately as you can. This may be used by Google as a snippet in the Search Engine Results Page (SERP)">
Semantic Tags
HTML5
- include semantic tags as an indicator of quality, and to make it easier for the robots to index content
- use
<header>
for the banner information<nav>
for navigation elements and<footer>
for the author, copyright, date, etc. <figure>
for important illustrations<article>
for the unique content<section>
for parts of the article<aside>
for extra information that is related, eg., links.
HTML
- include the
<h1>
to<h6>
tags. Try to include keywords in the first few words of these headers. - alt tags are indexed, so do include some keywords if appropriate
Links
- make your embedded (contextual) text links easy to understand, so use:
- not:
- for more about embedded text links being cognitive hand grenades click here
- for links to comments and message boards, avoid spam by including a “nofollow” rule:
<a href="messageboard.html" rel="nofollow">
Table of Contents
There’s some indication that a table of contents or jump menu for a page will help with ranking, and will make your content more useable, so we’ll try including this too.