Search Engine Optimization: Tags of Importance for SEO
Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the visibility of a web site or a web page in search engines via the "natural" or un-paid ("organic" or "algorithmic") search results. Other forms of search engine marketing (SEM) target paid listings. In general, the earlier (or higher on the page), and more frequently a site appears in the search results list, the more visitors it will receive from the search engine. SEO may target different kinds of search, including image search, local search, video search and industry-specific vertical search engines. This gives a web site web presence.
Title Tag: The title tag is a very important tag for many reasons, the first obvious reason is browser tab, with it you can specify exactly the content you want in the browser tab of your website. The second important reason is search engines, almost all search engines look and rely on the title tag in search results to provide better and more accurate content. So having the title tag is important, don’t forget it!
Keywords Meta Tag: The keywords meta tag is important with search engines. They use that tag to match search terms relevant to your website, which will most likely increase traffic originated from search engines. So if you don’t have the keywords meta tag already, add it and don’t forget to only add words relevant to your website.
Description Meta Tag: The description meta tag explains itself, it will basically provide a brief description of your page, this will help users decide if your page has what they want or not, so if you don’t have it, add it, you might be missing on some traffic because of it.
Robots Meta Tag: The robots meta tag controls what should be indexed and if links should be followed or not. Most reputable search engine recognize that tag so for example, if you want to index a page but you don’t want search engines to follow the links within the page, add "INDEX, NOFOLLOW". It’s an important tag and you should add it.
Canonical Tag: Google recently announced the support of the "canonical tag", which is a great addition for your website. It basically lets you control which URL to be indexed exactly if you have duplicate content. For example, let’s say you have two pages with the same content, /mypage.php and /my-page/, obviously you want the second one to be indexed instead of the first, so with the canonical tag you include which of the pages you want indexed and Google and maybe other search engines will recognize it.
Character Encoding Tag: This tag is very direct in its function, it sets the character encoding of your page so all browsers can render the content correct, it’s very useful so you should add it.
Doctype Tag: The Doctype tag specifies what markup language you’re using within your template, HTML 4, HTML 5, XHTML and so on. Some browsers also rely on that tag to specify how to render a specific page, it’s a very important tag so don’t forget it.
HTML Validation: Always make sure that your HTML is valid, otherwise your website might appear differently in other browsers, it could even be "unusable" because of a missing closing tag. So always make sure that you validate your HTML code.