HTML for SEO

HTML stands for Hyper Text Markup Language. It was created by a physicist Tim Berners-Lee in 1989 in the form of a proposal to CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research), where he was employed, along with a colleague. The proposal was for an internet based system developed with hypertext. He chose to call this internet system as the World Wide Web.

HISTORY

A first draft was published in 1991 by CERN by the name of HTML Tags. In 1993, a similar draft was published by IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force) called Hypertext Markup Language. In 1995, HTML 3.0 was run on IETF’s Arena browser, but failed due to improper browser development and the large number of demands by vendors for features. HTML 4.0 was introduced in 1997 by W3C. It came with three flavors, Strict, Transitional and Frameset. In January 2008, HTML 5.0 was published by the W3C as a working draft.

WHAT IS HTML MADE-UP OF?

HTML is a structured language, built on tags to define content to be used in its viewers like browsers, content management systems (CMS), web page design editors and Wikis. Tags are elements of the page such as headings, paragraphs, lists, links, or quotes. Content or language is written between the tags. Images, videos, and objects are also embedded in these tags. Tags have attributes that define and control their behaviour. For instance, the font tag has the attributes name, size, and color. HTML supports other elements of page design known as cascading style sheets (CSS). Among scripts, JavaScript, VBScript and LiveScript are supported, with JavaScript being used most. JavaScript is used for client side scripting of forms, dynamic menus, and dynamic HTML.

HTML has other extensions of XHTML, XML, and SGML. Berners-Lee introduced HTML as an application of SGML and a derived form of it. Though, HTML is about text and image formatting to dynamically format web pages, SGML is generalized markup based on elements with separation of structure and processing. XML is extended markup language used to transact data and content. XHTML is the hypertext version of XML, with DTDs, schemas, and namespaces. XHTML like XML requires the document to be valid and well-formed. Browsers need an XML parser to process XHTML documents. XHTML documents are more reliable and data friendly. Unlike HTML, reading and writing of data is easier with XHTML due to the availability of DTDs and Schemas.

HOW DOES SEO WORK WITH HTML?

Search engine optimization is used by web page designers and website developers to optimize their web pages for the search engines. Search engines crawl and spider the web frequently to index updated web pages on websites. Search engines look for Meta tags in web pages to identify their content. They also search the words in the web pages to delineate their content. HTML pages with the keywords Meta are of prime importance to search engines. Web pages are categorized based on this Meta’s. Next, search engines read the web pages to understand what the page is talking about. Based on this research and analysis, the page is given a sub-category and relevance. Page ranking is also done in similar manner. Relevance is based on the frequency of certain terms in a page along with the number of web pages linking to it.

Search engines only index the text in the content of web pages. Images, videos, Flash files are ignored by search engines. Some search engines are known to index PDF files. Google is one of them. But, this is more of an exception than a rule. Text is of primary importance to search engines as of now. Many search engines are working on new technologies to index images, videos, and other content. To reach top search engine positions, one should learn to optimize each and every page of their websites. Search engines have a special affinity for optimized pages as they are fast to read, well written, easy to comprehend and to the point. Unoptimized pages are difficult to read, takes them time to understand, may contain content garbage and may mislead them at categorization. Though, unoptimized pages are not rated lesser on relevance and page rank levels, it might become a factor for competing on keywords. Hence, a website with super content might be lax about their keywords meta’s, content grammar, or sentence formation, but may still earn high on relevance and page rank.

HOW CAN ONE USE AND MANIPULATE HTML FOR SEO PURPOSES AND BENEFITS?

Search engines base their indexing on text content. Text is of supreme importance to them. One way of manipulating HTML to achieve higher search engine rankings is to improve the content on the web pages. This can be done by using proper English, correct content grammar and appropriate sentence formation. Clean content makes more sense to the search engines compared to garbage or twisted language or misspellings. Use keywords with reserve. Try using keywords appropriate to your web page. A web page about baseball should have keywords of sports, baseball, etc and not about cars, technology or books. This will be a negative in scoring with the engines. The keyword or keywords in the main products page must always be different from the individual products page. A website about orange products like jams, squashes, and juices must have keywords of oranges, fruits, and food and keywords like jams, squashes and juices on the individual pages selling these products.

Use keywords in title of the page, meta’s of the page, description of the page, headings on the page, content on the page, in alt tags, and in anchor tags. Try contacting known websites with similar content for exchanging links with your website. Linking increases relevance and page rank twice as much as content in SEO. Though, linking with well ranked and proper websites only will earn you points with the engines. Another, hitch with search engines is the way they read HTML pages. If a tag is found unclosed or complicated nested tables reside on your web page, the search engine spider might ignore your content. Take care to close all your tags and double check your nested tables.