An internal analysis by Google, found that over 90% of their web properties could have improved their SEO simply by optimizing the TITLE tag format and length.

Titles are one the first things searchers see after performing a search query, so it will determine whether or not they will click on your listing and visit your site. It is also one of the most important on-page SEO factors. Also, when others link to your pages, they tend to use the page title as anchor text.

Ironically, the tag came last on my alphabetically-sorted list of tags when I started The Definitive HTML Guide for Search Engine Optimization series, but it got the entire deserved attention. I hope you will find the article useful either you are new to SEO or an experienced search engine optimization professional, or a marketing manager educating himself.

We know that <TITLE> is not really a HTML tag (it’s an element), but since everybody calls it a tag, we will use that term, to grab some search engine attention and, hopefully, some rankings/traffic for related terms ;)

There are tons of tips later within the article, but let’s start by debunking a popular myth and answer one of the most common questions about TITLE tag.

Myth: most of the knowledgeable webmasters and even advanced SEO professionals think that the content of the TITLE tag is the only piece Google uses to display the blue page titles within the search result pages (in the sample below the color is violate since it’s a visited URL):

Most of the times the content of the TITLE tag is displayed in SERPs

Fact: The content of the TITLE tag is part of the snippet equation but it’s not the entire part. To display page titles within SERPs Google uses relevancy rather than blindly following your TITLE’s tag content. If your title is not relevant to the user query, but the page content is, Google will use other sources to display a relevant page title.

This brings us to one of the most frequent questions of Google Webmaster Help forum:

Question: Why is Google changing/rewriting/not indexing my TITLE tag properly?

Answer: As mentioned before, Google’s mission is relevancy. To accomplish it, they use various sources and signals, which can be onpage signals (relevant parts from body content and headings, for example) or external sources (DMOZ or Yahoo! directory) to match user query with relevant search results.

There are cases when search engines need to modify the displayed titles, such as missing:

- malformed tag

- too short or too long titles

- URL is blocked by robots.txt but has lots of backlinks and they still decide to show it to users.

Watch the video below from Matt Cutts to hear it from the horse’s mouth, if you don’t believe me.

It is not that Google doesn’t index your titles correctly, it’s just that relevancy comes before whatever you put within the TITLE tag.

TITLE tag tips

When writing TITLE tags there are 3 masters to serve: SEO(rankings), CTR (clicks) and ROI(revenue). Order them any way you want, all of them are important and should play a role when crafting the perfect title. Most of the tips listed here are for SEO (rankings) and not CTR or ROI oriented.

Below is a list of recommendations that one should take into consideration when writing with SEO in mind.

Non HTML documents

The title for non HTML documents (such as .pdf or .doc files) is taken from the anchor texts pointing to the document, or from the document’s properties.

Social CTR metrics

The same way AdWords titles have the largest impact on CRT, titles within search results pages greatly influence click-through rates on search result listings. CTR is one of the social metrics used by Google to rank websites; therefore better CTR equals better rankings. If you can create enticing titles, while following other tips presented here, you’ll get a “double double” effect.

Hx matching

One method to reinforce the relevance of a document is by matching heading(s) on the page with the TITLE tag. If you can do an exact match between H1 and the title of the page, it will add more weight to the document outline. Since the exact match between the two is not always possible you should aim at least at having the keyword from the TITLE tag repeated within other headings (H2 or H3).

Remember, the words in the title of the page should reflect the content of that page and should be present within the content, otherwise search engines may not display your original title in the search results pages.

Keyword significance consolidation

This is a great tip that will help you increase your site keywords’ significance, which in return will create more “authority” around the targeted keyword:

1) on the home page, place the most top-level generalized keyword for your website at the very beginning of the TITLE tag

2) repeat that keyword on ALL other internal pages at the end of the title tag (after the brand name, if it’s the case, even if the title is going to be longer than 65 chars).Ideally, the reinforced keyword should come after the 65 char limit

3) make sure that keyword shows at least twice per hundred words copy on each page of the website

4) consolidate anchor texts from internal pages to point to the home page using the keyword used the beginning of the title tag on home page

On our own website, see how nicely the most significant keywords are floating around optimization, marketing and search:

The number of occurrences dictates the keyword significance

Geo-targeting

If you’re targeting a specific region/city/province, it’s advisable to mention it in the TITLE tag in order to show up for a local search query such as “Vancouver SEO“. This approach is great when you’re a start up and can compete on low to medium difficulty keywords only. Once you grow and support your rankings with external backlinks, you can revise the targeted keywords and geo-targeting options.

Ecommerce sites should build unique pages for each retail store in their chain. The address (at least city and state/province, should be placed in the TITLE tag and the pages should support and reinforce the address with addresses and geo tagged images (link to image tag).

Holiday Specific Titles

You will love this technique, but you’ll hate me for making you work harder.

User behaviour is changing around holidays (boxing day, mother’s day, Halloween, etc) and so is the way they search. If you’re an online retailer (or if you know that your audience might be searching for specific events related keywords) you should be able to change your titles easily to accommodate that behaviour change. Around Christmas, it’s much more enticing for users to see and click on “Christmas Gifts for Him. All Items on Sale & FREE Shipping” than “Gifts for Him. All Items on Sale & FREE Shipping“.

The titles are changed to match user behavior during Christmas

For more information on this please read the article holiday-specific titles.

Char count

This is another very misunderstood concept. Google doesn’t index only 65 chars (or close). It only displays 65-70 chars, cropping the complete words if they run over this limit, but it indexes as much as 250 chars per some tests (I’ve read about 1000 chars being entirely indexed). Knowing this it opens doors to new opportunities, such as thinking your titles in blocks rather than a one piece. It may worth testing a bit:

1) First block, the first 65 characters, where you would craft your perfect title (keywords, branding and call to action). This will be the title seen by people on search engines.

2) Second block, second-tier keywords, plurals, synonyms or other strategies. On pages other than the home page you can repeat the top most important keyword for your website, at the very end of the title.

Branded titles

If some SEO experts are advising you to remove the brand name from your titles, they could be wrong. You should know better than them the goal of your organic traffic campaign and should act accordingly:

- if you have a well established brand (i.e. Amazon) you may want to have the brand at the beginning of the title;

- if you are trying to build a brand and your efforts are sustained by SEO, brand name will be the first word

- If your brand has some recognition you can still place and your campaign goal is to drive unbranded traffic, the brand name can be placed at the end of the tag.

- If you’re company name is not well known, or if you don’t care about branding, don’t put your brand name in the title at all

Big brands like Amazon are branding their page titles right at the beginning of the tag

Keyword prominence

The main targeted keyword should be at the beginning of the TITLE tag. Period!

Keyword proximity

If you target keywords with more than two words, they better be one next to each other, i.e. if you target “marketing services” you should not have anything in between the two words.

Modifiers

Modifiers are those words that can be placed before or after your targeted keyword, to address a specific segment of the market. Keywords can be generally categorized into 3 main categories informational/educational, transactional/purchase intent and navigational/geo-location.

Depending on the pages you write titles for, you can add a transactional modifier (buy, sale, discount, cheap) for product pages, directional/geo (Vancouver, BC or Seattle, WA) on store locations page or educational/informational (learn, discover, read, find) for your white papers or case studies/success stories.

Keywords order

In many cases you will find that there’s a different search volume for the same 2-word combinations. For example “Vancouver SEO” has a different search volume compared with “SEO Vancouver“. Obviously, you should focus on the keyword with highest demand. You can compensate the other keyword with internal anchor support and/or by including it within your description, headings and main body content.

The two keywords have different search volumes

Singular or plural? Or both?

Google doesn’t recommend repeating the same word more than twice in a TITLE tag. But is the plural considered a repetition of the singular? Given the way search engines interpret content (by bringing the word to their root form) I would tend to say, yes, it is a repetition. But you will be fine if you use the keyword no more than twice, once in singular and once in plural. This strategy may have some impact on ecommerce stores, where people may search for “dell laptops” or “dell laptop”. Another option is to write your perfect title in blocks, within the first 65-70 displayed chars and repeat the keywords in a plural/singular variation at the end.

Stop words

Words such as and, or, the, in or for are called stop words. Search engines will most of the time filter them out when computing page relevance. After all, no one cares how many times you’ve use the word “I” or “WE” on a page. You should aim to use as few of them as possible, since you SERPs title space is limited. As a good practice you should remove them from URLs too. In case you’re interested here’s txt file with more stop words.

Separators

The most used separator is the pipe sign “|” but others are acceptable too, such as hyphens and commas. Do not use underscores or use any of the following special characters in title text: ‘ ” < > { } [ ] ( ).

Some websites are using catchy titles that use a lot of non alphabet symbols, such as ~~~!FREE iPODS!~~~ to grab attention and possibly higher CTRs. Keep in mind that use of special symbols may get you better CTR but also might rise spam penalties.

Char savers

If you need to squeeze more text you can replace word like “and” with & symbol, “or” with / or “copyrights” with ©. Remember to implement special chars using HTML entities (& with &amp; © with &copy; and so on).

Other space savers are abbreviations (i.e. instead of search engine optimization you could use SEO) or shorter synonyms for the word, or variations of your chosen key terms, tee-shirt and T-shirt.

The decision on which version should be used, has to be based on the search volume for those keywords and even be based on the content targeted on the page. For example, if your content targets mid stage customers, using the jargon “onsite SEO” in the title might be ok, since they might already be familiar with it, but it may not be used by early stage prospects.

Call to action (CTA)

Your page titles act like headlines within SERPs and a compelling call to action can actually generate more clicks for the page listed #2 than a poor title listed #1. One of the most important element tested in advertising, and conversion rate optimization, are headlines.

Usually, CTA are strong verbs, strong unique selling propositions (USP) or promotional words. Sometimes store/inventory-wide promotions can affect CTR also. An example of a promotional title can look like “All Digital Cameras 60% OFF ……”. There’s an interesting thread on this subject here.

Exact match

If a three/four-word phrase such as “internet marketing services” drives qualified traffic, it’s best to have that exact phrase as opposed to having those words appear out of order, such as “Internet services: marketing and web hosting“.

Capitalization

One or two words can be in uppercase, but an entire title written with caps lock on will raise spam flags, so don’t do it. Keep this in mind when you add document properties for non HTML documents. Capitalizing each first letter of the word is acceptable.

Competitive differentiators

If you know that your target market is sensitive to a particular feature or benefits which is part of your unique selling proposition(lowest price guarantee) or competitive edge(i.e. the only retailer for a product) you can use it to attract more clicks on your listings and differentiate from others (which can generate better conversion rates)

Apart from the entire list of tips, here are some basic, boring things about titles (you already know this stuff, right?):

- Each page should have a TITLE tag (muhahahah)

- TITLE tag should not be empty

- Each page should have only one TITLE tag

- The TITLE tag belongs inside the HEAD section of a web page

- The content of the TITLE tag should be different from the contents of the META description tag

- The TITLE tag of each page should be unique and distinct from the TITLE tags of other pages in a site.

Pitstop Media offers ROI based internet marketing services such as SEO services. If you need help with your search engine optimization projects please contact us for a free, no obligation quote. We’ve helped companies rank on the first page of Google in a short period of time for highly competitive terms. Let us rank your website on the first page, too!

Rate this post!

TITLE Tag SEO – The Definitive HTML Reference Guide for Search Engine Optimization is a post from Search Engine Marketing Pros
Pitstop Media is a Vancouver based search engine marketing company which offers results oriented PPC and SEO services. If you need help with your search engine optimization projects or with pay per click management and/or PPC optimization please contact us for a free, no obligation quote. We've helped companies rank on the first page of Google in a short period of time for highly competitive terms, and we've reduced paid advertising cost by as much as 148% while increased AdWords conversion rates by as much as 410%. Let us rank your website on the first page, too!

Related posts:

1. META Tags and SEO – The Complete HTML Guide for Search Engine Optimization
2. LINK Tag, REL attribute and SEO – The Complete HTML Guide for Search Engine Optimization
3. List Items and SEO – The Complete HTML Reference Guide for SEO

Blog networks is a fancy name for something that already existed since long ago: satellite websites, or web rings if you like.

Creating a blog network to drive traffic to your ecommerce site can still be a viable strategy, even post Panda update, as long as the purpose of such a network is to genuinely provide great information to visitors. As a positive side effect, the network may also provide limited PR juice by back linking to your ecommerce site.

But let’s be clear from the beginning. If your goal is to actually increase the number of backlinks with a blog network, I don’t recommend this tactic. I call blog networks whose sole purpose is backlinking, blog farms. Just like any other types of “web farms” they are not in compliance with search engines’ guidelines.

This is a sample of how blog farms could look like

Also, remember that the single most important SEO factor when considering a blog network (for ecommerce or other purposes) is, you guessed, quality content.

There are several things to consider even before going into technical setups.

• Your entire network should focus on your ecommerce niche solely. If you sell car accessories, do not start a blog about oil paintings
• For each blog in the network you need to write great, original content. Do not copy from other websites, PLR (private label rights) articles or automatically spin articles. Remember, compelling content is the key to avoid Panda-like penalties
• Each blog in your network should focus on a single topic, usually targeting subcategory or category keywords
• Start small, with 2-3 blogs to warm up and understand the challenges of maintaining such a network
• Choose WordPress as your CMS platform (you may even want to consider WP multiple install version)
• 20 blogs in your network will not raise any spam flags if you interlink them. More than 50 will surely do
• It is important to also have a blog on your ecommerce site too, where you write the masterpieces and link internally to home page, categories and product pages with the correct anchor texts
• Don’t stuff the blogs within your network with ads. Remember, the purpose of the network is to educate and impress with quality content

Important Note

There are lots of companies out there which created blog networks for the sole purpose of selling links to their clients and SEO agencies. We don’t use them nor for us or our clients.

One of the many emails we receive for joining blog farms

The problem is that they are not able to sustain the network with quality content and most of the time their blogs will not focus on a single theme. You will find the same blog (or even worse, the same article) linking to adult or gambling sites and rogue pharmacies. This will hurt your backlinking efforts more than it will help.

And, did you know that once you stop paying them off, your links are disappearing? Considering only this, you’re better with AdWords than with paid links.

We recommend staying away from such blog farms and do your hard work (content writing) which will pay off down the bumpy SOE road.

Another piece of advice is to ask your SEO services provider if they are using blog networks to build links to your ecommerce site. If they do, RUN. That’s a time bomb which can blow you out of Google’s index for good.

Now, let’s get into more specific details

Domain names

Ideally, your blog domain names should match the targeted keywords and they should end in dot com.

As you can see Google still give higher importance to keyword in domain matches

That is not possible nowadays, so here’s some workarounds:

• You should prioritize domain names the same way you prioritized your ecommerce information architecture:
  • Your ecommerce home page should target the single most important keyword for your industry; don’t target that keyword with a blog within your network.
  • Blogs targeting your ecommerce categories, sub categories and even products can also have other TLD than dot com
  • If you don’t find the exact match for a keyword and domain name, you can try to add suffixes or prefixes, whichever sounds better for you target language, i.e. for car accessories you can try the domain name interiorcaraccessories.com – use Google Keyword tool to find some of the most search phrases
• Register each domain with different names, on different dates and make them private (Google is a registrar and has access to your names even if you put them on private). You can use the same credit card, no one (ideally) will not have access to it.

Hosting

It is much easier to handle the entire network within the same hosting account/company. By doing so it will allow one update for all plug-ins and for the CMS platform, easy access to all domain names hosted there. But if Page Rank is what you’re after, there’s very less of it if you host everything on the same account (the only exception is if you can buy different C class IPs).

If you want to see some back linking benefits you need to consider the following:

• go with a different hosting for each domain name so you get different class-C IP addresses for each blog
• buy dedicated IP addresses for each blog, don’t go with shared IPs

Sometimes you can negotiate with the hosting company, and if they can offer different C-class IPs , you can host on the same account.

Sometime you can find web hosts that sell different C Class IPs

You may be tempted to go with hosts that offer preinstalled WP blogs, but that will not serve you well if you plan on customizing each blog.

Also, starting on different hosting account is a good idea since you will be able to test the performance and stability of their systems, then choose the best one.

CMS platform

There’s no other platform I would recommend for a blog network, than WordPress. There are a good number of SEO plugins that can help you with onsite SEO and there’s a huge community around it, making troubleshooting issues quite easy.

There's no better CMS platform for blog networks than WordPress

Additionally, you could consider WordPress Multisite, but that will not serve you well if you want to get some PR juice from your blog network.

Choose a unique (preferably professional ones) theme for each blog in the network and work on unique, original About Us pages. If you don’t care about hiding from search engine, your contact details can be same as the ones on your ecommerce website, but on the About Us page you should focus more on the author (even if you use a “stage name” for your authors).

Interlinking architecture

The interlinking architecture should be conceptualized based on the blog network’s goal. If your goal is to generate traffic and awareness about the products you sell with the ecommerce site then you can interlink the blogs in any way you like. In case your goal is just Page Rank flow (which I don’t recommend) then you have to think of a flat architecture, similarly to how a website architecture will look like, only that you will link from bottom to top.

Usually the less competitive keywords (i.e. product keywords) will support more competitive keywords (i.e. branded products or sub categories)

If you’re going after PR and try to hide your network form the search engines, your product blogs should link to subcategory blogs only, then subcategory blogs should link to categories blog, categories blog should link to categories pages on your ecommerce website.

Keep in mind that if you think that search engines are not able to map out linking schemes, you are wrong.

For black hat aspirers

If you want to stay unindider the Google’s radar you will need to:

• Use unique data for everything related to your blog network: whois data for domain names, hosting, IP addresses but also contact info on your blog. Never share the same AdWords, AdSense, Google Analytics or any other Google properties on websites.
• Uninstall Google toolbar and other software from Google or Google’s partners
• Access your blogs only using transparent proxies
• Don’t use Google Chrome as your browser
• Hide yourself from search engines, which probably mean not accepting or blocking cookies.

Lastly, but not less important, you have to balance the efforts and budget for managing tens of blogs and weight against other opportunities (such as guest blogging, sponsored posts) for getting backlinks for your ecommerce site.

One final caution, would you rather get 1000 links pointing to you main ecommerce site or have 50 links pointing to 20 different domains names? I would choose the first option.

Pitstop Media offers ROI based internet marketing services such as SEO services. If you need help with your search engine optimization projects please contact us for a free, no obligation quote. We’ve helped companies rank on the first page of Google in a short period of time for highly competitive terms. Let us rank your website on the first page, too!

Rate this post!

SEO Best Practices for eCommerce Blog Networks is a post from Search Engine Marketing Pros
Pitstop Media is a Vancouver based search engine marketing company which offers results oriented PPC and SEO services. If you need help with your search engine optimization projects or with pay per click management and/or PPC optimization please contact us for a free, no obligation quote. We've helped companies rank on the first page of Google in a short period of time for highly competitive terms, and we've reduced paid advertising cost by as much as 148% while increased AdWords conversion rates by as much as 410%. Let us rank your website on the first page, too!

Related posts:

1. Ecommerce SEO – 10 SEO Tips to Optimize Product Descriptions
2. Discover Your Competitors Blog Engagement Rate
3. AdWords Tips – Parked Domains and Error Pages

Used almost exclusively in the ranking algorithms at the beginning of the ’90s, some META tags can still influence rankings and click through rates even nowadays. And with good CTR on results pages, comes a bit of improved rankings too.

Probably meta tags optimization is one of the first things SEO beginners learn to do. But the purpose of this article is to go beyond the basics and explain which ones are good, bad or ugly. The article is structured into 3 parts: The Good meta tags (the ones which you should use if appropriate), The Bad (the ones you should avoid) and The Ugly (the ones that don’t have any influence and can be removed).

Before I start, I need to say something. If the only thing you do for your clients is to optimize META tags and TITLE tags, please stop saying that you’re providing SEO services (or Internet marketing services). SEO is way, way more than that.

The meta tag is accompanied by the name attribute. There are many values that can be used under the name (or http-equiv) attribute of the META element, but not all of them can influence search engine decisions. Without getting into details about every attribute (one could write entire articles for each meta tag) let’s start with a simple one:

The Good Meta Tags

KEYWORDS

Most of the SEO expert will cry out loud: “you’re darn stupid” to consider the keywords tag useful. Don’t judge judge me for putting it in the list of the good meta tags until you read below, about how you could use this tag and spin it in something useful for searchers and search engines. Sure, this one doesn’t deserve the head of the list in terms of importance, but there’s been lot’s of debate around it and I wanted to get over it fast. But, there are  a couple of things that you need to know about it:

1. Major search engines (Google, Yahoo!, and Bing) don’t use the content of the keywords meta tag to rank pages.

2. Small search engines and vertical engines might still use it.

My advice is to still have unique keywords meta tags for each page of your website; they won’t hurt you. Just don’t spend too much time on generating them. Keep the tag below 15 keywords and make sure that the keywords you list inside are actually present in the main body text of the page.

Here’s a very nice spin for this tag: repeat keywords from this tag into page tags clouds; duplicate your keywords from the keywords meta tag somewhere on the page into tags. Your tags can be related searches performed on your internal site search.

DESCRIPTION

This is probably the single most important piece of meta data you can provide to a search engine. It’s bots’ food. If the content is wisely crafted and relevant to the page content search engines will display its content as the snippet below the blue page title:

The blue border highlights the snippet as seen in Google search results.

If a search query and a web page are a positive match within search engines’ database, AND the searched words are NOT present within the DESCRITPION meta tag, search engines will use the description tag to create the snippet, but instead they will replace the snippet with some content on the page, or the description from DMOZ or Yahoo! Directory.

Very briefly, here’s something that you need to know about the DESCRIPTION meta tag:

- Place the targeted keyword as close as possible to the beginning (keyword prominence)

- Keep the # of chars below 150 and above 25, including spaces

- Don’t start the tag with your brand name

- Write unique descriptions for each page

- Don’t repeat the page title inside this tag

- Don’t use any of the following special characters in description text: ‘ ” < > { } [ ] ( )

CONTENT-LANGUAGE

This one is still important especially for multi language websites. Use it in the head of the page to help search engines correctly identify the language the page’s content is written in. To identify the language a web page is written in, search engines don’t rely solely on the existence of this tag. But it’s always a good idea to provide additional clues.

CONTENT-TYPE

This one can be used to specify the language and character encoding of the document. content-type tag does not impact your search engine rankings and if you do not include it, the users browser will fall back to its default charset. Use it on multi language/charset web sites.

AUTHOR

This one seems to become more and more important. Google is now supporting the rel=”author” attribute on LINK tags.

If you want to make sure you’re credited as the original author of a piece of content use this meta data within your META tags too.

The Ugly Meta Tags

These tags are neutral; they don’t have either positive or negative effects. In a single word, they’re just useless.

GEO

While some other search engines might still used it, from Google’s point of view the debate is over – you don’t need to use it to specify the targeted countries. Instead use Google/Bing/Yahoo! Webmaster account to specify the targeted country.

SOURCE

This meta tag is mainly used for Google News, to correctly identify the source of the article. However, as with any other meta data, search engines don not rely solely on the information provided by webmasters. Most engines will have their own original source algorithms (i.e. the website where they cached the content on for the first time, the first reference/link to that content and so on).

Google is using this tag along with the canonical attribute and this article might be useful for content aggregators.

ROBOTS

Having a robots meta tag to tell engines to index and follow your pages/links is useless.

However, the robots tag becomes useful if you want to tell search engines which pages you don’t want indexed, cached or links followed. It can be useful to address duplicate content issues.

Long before the Search Engine Exclusion Protocol was invented, this tag was used by programmers to block search engines. Now you should rely on both, the robots meta tag and robots.txt. I suggest reading www.robotstxt.org and understand how it works.

Possible values under the content attribute for this tag are noindex, nofollow, noarchive, all, index, or follow.

REVISIT AFTER

You may use this tag to tell search engines to revisit your page after 1 minute, but are they going to do that? No, they don’t follow this directive.

The Bad Meta Tags

REFRESH

Used mainly to redirect visitors to another page (and hijacking PR :)), this tag is the wrong way of implementing redirects. If you have access to the .htaccess file to redirect from, the proper way to deal with redirects is with server side redirects. Using .htaccess file you’ll pass link juice to the redirected page.

The W3C recommends that this tag not be used.

CACHE CONTROL

This tells browsers where to serve the web document from: browser cache or request it again from the server. And again, this is not the best way to implement it. If you have access to your server setting, probably HTTP headers are better at doing this properly.

Pitstop Media offers ROI based internet marketing services such as SEO services. If you need help with your search engine optimization projects please contact us for a free, no obligation quote. We’ve helped companies rank on the first page of Google in a short period of time for highly competitive terms. Let us rank your website on the first page, too!

Rate this post!

META Tags and SEO – The Complete HTML Guide for Search Engine Optimization is a post from Search Engine Marketing Pros
Pitstop Media is a Vancouver based search engine marketing company which offers results oriented PPC and SEO services. If you need help with your search engine optimization projects or with pay per click management and/or PPC optimization please contact us for a free, no obligation quote. We've helped companies rank on the first page of Google in a short period of time for highly competitive terms, and we've reduced paid advertising cost by as much as 148% while increased AdWords conversion rates by as much as 410%. Let us rank your website on the first page, too!

Related posts:

1. LINK Tag, REL attribute and SEO – The Complete HTML Guide for Search Engine Optimization
2. Html Tags with Little or No SEO influence – Complete HTML Reference Guide for SEO
3. br, hr, p and pre Tags and SEO – Complete HTML Reference Guide for SEO

Boy, I spent an entire day watching all Matt Cutts’ videos on Google Webmaster Channel on YouTube. Over 350 short movies, mostly on SEO Q&A.

The collection below is a summary of SEO myths and straight answers from Matt, things that I thought might be nice to have in a single place. Most of the SEO videos below are either debunking myths such as “duplicate content penalty” or HTML/CSS valid pages will rank higher, and a bit more advanced stuff, such as how to choose between rel canonical and 301 redirects. Stuff non related to SEO, or very basic advice, was not included .

HTML sitemap are still recommended throught your website

So, don’t remove that page simply because “experts” are telling you don’t need it. It is still useful for content discovery.

The number of subdirectories in a URL doesn’t affect its ranking

But it will affect how users perceive your website. The number of clicks to that document still matter.

For long paths, keywords in the directory structure are recommended against long  file names

So, don’t use /cat-subcat-subcat1-subcat2-product but /cat/subcat/subcat1/subcat2/product

Site downtimes affect rankings

Got it right? Bad hosting, possibly not indexed

Use rel canonical when you can’t do 301. Otherwise, 301 rules

Search engines will follow a 301 in 100% of the cases, and maybe canonical

URL shorteners pass anchor text and PR

So, you can use them if branding means nothing to you.

Domain name history affect its trust in Google

You’ll wish you would’t build your domain portfolio just on p0rn sites :)

Don’t use nofollow on internal links

Page Rank sculpting anyone? But check the other videos for some surprises.

First link on the page is not important

Some could swear that the anchor text of the first link is the most important.

Google looks at the URL of images to rank them. At meta data too

Google doesn’t use keywords meta tag

This should be old news for most of the advanced SEO, but I’ve included it just to remind all others the truth

HTML validation doesn’t provide any boost in rankings

So, stop selling valid code as “SEO services”. It’s just BS! PS: most of you may want to first validate your pages before selling such services.

Google crawls forms with dropdowns. Or it used too.

That’s why we used to get tens of web leads from Google bot?

Links in footer are treated differently. Duhh!?

If only that will be true, then 80% of the paid links will not be accounted for. And paid links are still working, even in the footer.

There’s no 100kb limits

So let’s not worry about having content that matters on the top (CSS tricks) and focus on quality, ok?

CSS is not more search engine friendly than HTML

Again, you the design agency that sells CSS search engine optimized code. Stop the BS!

Server location is a factor in google rankings

Oops, now that hurts. If I have my bestbuy.com DNS in US I won’t rank in Canada… Sad, but true!

you can put the nofollow on login pages

Wait, I thought you said, no nofollowed links on internal pages. Actually, go ahead guys, password protected content can be no followed.

nofollow on privacy doesn’t generate a spam penality

True, but Page Rank sculpting could. Is a website without a privacy page indexed in search engines better for users? Please don’t add nofollow on that link, guys…

the order of h1 and h2 shouldn’t be a worry

We kind of knew that, but it’s good that it has been clarified.

Use dashes or hyhepns instead of underscores

Oldie but goldie. Keep using the “-”

Mentions are not used in rankings

A mention is when someone talks about your website name, i.e. somesite.com but doesn’t link the site name with an anchor

use absolute URLs in rel canonical

If you can, use absolute URLs everywhere on your website, not only in the rel attribute

That’s all folks!

Pitstop Media offers ROI based internet marketing services such as SEO services. If you need help with your search engine optimization projects please contact us for a free, no obligation quote. We’ve helped companies rank on the first page of Google in a short period of time for highly competitive terms. Let us rank your website on the first page, too!

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SEO Myths and Advices from 350+ Matt Cutts Videos is a post from Search Engine Marketing Pros
Pitstop Media is a Vancouver based search engine marketing company which offers results oriented PPC and SEO services. If you need help with your search engine optimization projects or with pay per click management and/or PPC optimization please contact us for a free, no obligation quote. We've helped companies rank on the first page of Google in a short period of time for highly competitive terms, and we've reduced paid advertising cost by as much as 148% while increased AdWords conversion rates by as much as 410%. Let us rank your website on the first page, too!

Related posts:

1. The Anchor Tag and SEO – Complete HTML Reference Guide for SEO
2. Minimize the Impact of Website Testing on SEO
3. Html Tags with Little or No SEO influence – Complete HTML Reference Guide for SEO

The LINK tag has influence on search engines crawling, indexing and also rankings, if the HREF attribute is present within it. Also, the LINK tag can contain another important attribute, the REL attribute. This attribute, along with HREF, can provide more information to search engine bots about the relationship between the interlinked URLs.

Keep in mind that the REL attribute can be applied to an A tag too. This means that you can specify relationships between the interlinked documents not only in the head section of your web pages, but anywhere inside your documents.

The opposite of the REL attribute is the REV attribute and you can find a good explanation of both in here. For more values of the REL attribute here’s a comprehensive list. Keep in mind that the list of supported values for REL attribute is different for HTML 4 and HTML 5.

Why do you need to pay attention this attribute?

First, some search engines will use the LINK tag to discover other documents. To identify new documents they will try to crawl the URL provided in the HREF value of this tag. The relationship between the interlinked documents is specified in the REL attribute and the type of relationship can have very important consequences on how search engines crawl your website (think about the canonical value of the REL attribute or nofollow).

Second, some browsers may display navigational icons when they identify an RSS feed associated with the current document, which is great for usability and improving behavioral metrics such as page views or time on site:

Some REL attributes can be used by browsers to improve user experience

Third, you can use this attribute to provide search engine additional information about the interlinked documents. For example you can specify the author of the linked document, which can help bots identify the original source of a content, even if it gets copied and republished over and over again. Google is now supporting the author value of the REL attribute and use it to determine the relevancy of one’s page to a user’s query. Here‘s the official document describing how you can use the author and me.

Should you worry about all values for this attribute?

No. There are tens of allowed values for rel, but in terms of SEO, I think you should pay attention to the following values:

canonical – the most important attribute, tells search engines which page should be indexed when there are duplicate or very similar versions of the same page across the same site (or even different websites). This attribute deserve an article on its own, but until I’ll write one please read the official guideline from Google. It’s important to know that canonical is passing PR just as with any other ordinary A links.

Duplicate or similar content such as print, feed or pdf page can be addressed with rel="canonical"

nofollow – this is the “no Page Rank juice” attribute and you should basically use it on all external links for which you don’t want to pass PR.

alternate AND hreflang – the alternate value becomes important when combined with HREFLANG, to unify content under multilingual templates. “If you translate only the template of your pages, such as the side navigation and footer, while keeping the bulk of your content in a single language (as often happens on pages featuring user-generated content), using REL=”alternate” HREFLANG=”x” along with REL=”canonical” or 301 redirects is a good technique to help Google serve the correct language URL to searchers” – excerpt from Google Webmaster Central. You should also read this article, which is also related to multiple languages on the same site.

Multilanguage menus with main menu in the same language

author or me – author and me can be used to define relationships between a web document and its author(s). This can be used by search engines to determine the original author for duplicate content. The official document describing how you can use the author and me, can be found here. Briefly put, if you link to your profiles on any social network from other web documents, use the REL=”me” attribute to tell search engines that the linked page belongs to you and is your social profile.

tag – this value introduces us to the micro formats. By adding REL=”tag” to a hyperlink, a page indicates that the destination of that hyperlink is an author-designated “tag” (or keyword/subject) for the current page.

bookmark - The HTML4 spec describes a bookmark as “a link to a key entry point within an extended document”. By convention, this entry point also captures the notion of a “permalink”.

previous and next – these are used to suggest a series of documents related to each other (it can be an article split in multiple parts, multi-page categories on an ecommerce website, search result pages) and are used by Google to understand relationships between pages.

license – you can use this value for copyright attribution on your own images. Here’s how:

There are an impressive number of REL values for social networks (The XHTML Friends Network) but those are not (yet) so widely used or possibly not influencing  rankings at this time. Some of them might be used by Google to establish relationships between social network accounts and even show up in the search results:

Such snippets could become more and more frequent

Bonus 1: did you know that you can actually alter the appearance of the links that contain the REL attribute, such as adding a specific icon for each value of the attribute? Here‘s a tutorial on how to do it.

Bonus 2: in case you want to specify a canonical version for documents which really don’t generate an html code (i.e. pdf documents), Google is now supporting REL=”canonical” in HTTP Headers.

Pitstop Media offers ROI based internet marketing services such as SEO services. If you need help with your search engine optimization projects please contact us for a free, no obligation quote. We’ve helped companies rank on the first page of Google in a short period of time for highly competitive terms. Let us rank your website on the first page, too!

LINK Tag, REL attribute and SEO – The Complete HTML Guide for Search Engine Optimization is a post from Search Engine Marketing Pros
Pitstop Media is a Vancouver based search engine marketing company which offers results oriented PPC and SEO services. If you need help with your search engine optimization projects or with pay per click management and/or PPC optimization please contact us for a free, no obligation quote. We've helped companies rank on the first page of Google in a short period of time for highly competitive terms, and we've reduced paid advertising cost by as much as 148% while increased AdWords conversion rates by as much as 410%. Let us rank your website on the first page, too!

Related posts:

1. The Anchor Tag and SEO – Complete HTML Reference Guide for SEO
2. blockquote, cite and q Tag and SEO – Complete HTML Reference Guide for SEO
3. IMG Tag SEO and Image Optimization – The Complete HTML Reference Guide for SEO

HTML lists are semantic structures by definition and they can play an important role when a web document is analyzed for its relevancy against a search query. Since relevancy – along with page popularity (backlinks) and social signals – is strongly related to search engine rankings, it is important to understand how search engines analyze their content.

Lists can contain unordered information (UL), ordered information (OL) and definitions (DL, DD, DT tags). In HTML code this is how an ordered list might look like:

<ul>

<li>Unordered information

<li>Ordered information

<li>Definitions

</ul>

There have always been discussions if lists can actually influence the semantics of a web page and therefore rankings. Yes, they actually do.

Before exemplifying how a good optimized list items would look like, I have to mention about one of the existing Google patents, which relates to HTML lists. The patent, called Document Ranking Based On Semantic Distance Between Terms In A Document specifically refers to HTML lists when describing how the distance between words can influence rankings.

This image is used in the patent documentation. As you can see there’s a list and a list head (Saturn Facts)

Saturn Facts is considered a heading because of larger text formatting

The patent gives us the following rules about headings and list items, when it comes to the distance between words appearing within them:

- If both terms appear in the same list item, the terms are considered close to one another;

- If one term appears in a list item and the other term appears in header, this pair of terms may be considered to be approximately equally distant to another pair of terms that appear in header and in another of the list items;

- Pairs of terms appearing in different list items may be considered to be farther apart than the pairs of terms falling under 1 and 2.

So, in the Saturn example above, the words “Saturn” (from the heading of the list) and “Distance” (from the last list item) are considered closer together than the words “Days” and “Rotation” even though “Days” is the last word of the first list item and “Rotation” is the first word of the second list item.

The above is an excerpt from Bill Slawski’s blog, who has a more detailed analysis of the patent. Many thanks to Bill again for illustrating the paragraph above with an image:

A different kind of keyword proximity

What the images shows is that the gap between Days and Rotation is considered bigger that Saturn and Distance but also

• the word in the header, Saturn, can used as base reference (position 0, let’s say) for other words in the list
• the distance between Saturn and other words is computed against each LI tag from the list. So Saturn is zero words away from words One, Rotation, Mass and Volume. But, Saturn is 6 words away from Days (including stop words)

This means that if someone would search for Saturn Volume, this document would have higher chances of rankings than if someone would search for Saturn Earth.

The approach described in the patent comes to a bit of change for the definition of keyword proximity. The method keyword proximity is computed within lists seems to be a bit different than the classic definition, which derives it based on the actual distance between the words, as they appear in the source code.

If we were to compute the classic keyword proximity, the word Rotation will be 8 words away from Saturn (facts, one, orbit, of, sun, is, 10,759.2, days). However, within lists and list headings, the distance is zero.

If you care of keyword proximity when you list items on your content, you need to take into consideration that keyword proximity is computed differently.

Briefly, here’s how an optimized code will look like, for a good HTML list:

<div>Here is some useful info on</div>

<h3>Search Engine Optimization</h3>

<ul title=”SEO resources for advanced users”>

<li>Tutorial for advanced users</li>

<li>Cost and ROI of SEO</li>

<li>Experts sharing their opinions on SEO</li>

<ul>

The words Tutorial, Costs and Experts were taken from Google Keywords Suggestion Tool and can be a part of your secondary or tertiary keywords, for which you may want to have a dedicated page targeting only them.

You can find some keyword suggestions with Google's Keyword Tool

Keep in mind that linking the word Tutorial will make the linked page more relevant towards that word. When you link inside lists, be careful not only about the proximity of the words relating to the nearest heading above (for same page relevancy) but also about the anchor text used to link to other dedicated pages (for outbound page relevancy). You want to have a mix of both. I would rather not link within the list with the anchor text Tutorial, but rather link within the body content with the anchor search engine optimization tutorial.

Now, suddenly list items are not as easy to deal with as you were used to. Sorry about that. However, remember the most important rule for on page SEO: write for humans, not for search engines.

Some particular cases of lists are navigation menus and breadcrumbs. While it seems logic to have your left navigation for an ecommerce site as list items, you need to make sure that sections such as drop down menus, or expandable facets are actually getting indexed by search engines. This means you need to implement menus and breadcrumbs in such a way that search engine bots can read the text and the links inside them with JavaScript turned off. Otherwise your site might get into indexing issues, not pass Page Rank to the important pages or other issues you don’t want to get into.

Here is a sample script for creating pure CSS drop down menu or here for a simple UL LI CSS SEO friendly horizontal menu.

Approach this kind of implementation carefully.

Now let’s look very briefly at other types of lists, the definition tags, DD, DT and DL

<dd> – definition description (also can be used for speaker’s words in dialogs)

This tag is used to describe an item in a definition list. The text within the <dd> tag will influence the overall page’s theme, and the semantic of the entire definition, but there isn’t much you can do to alter your rankings by playing with the <dd> tag attributes, except of course, writing good content within it.

While there are arguments that you can use <dd>,<dl> and <dt> tags to bring your site on the search results for “define:word” type of results, I’ve seen no proof until date. If you want to have page with better semantics, use them. It seems to somehow help with dictionary-type pages or glossaries.

<dl> – definition list – this tag is used with <dd> and <dt> to define lists

Use it mostly when you create definition types of lists, like glossary pages, FAQs

<dt> – definition term (also can be used for speaker in dialogs)

See the <dl> and <dd> tags above and read this document and this one.

Pitstop Media offers ROI based internet marketing services such as SEO services. If you need help with your search engine optimization projects please contact us for a free, no obligation quote. We’ve helped companies rank on the first page of Google in a short period of time for highly competitive terms. Let us rank your website on the first page, too!

List Items and SEO – The Complete HTML Reference Guide for SEO is a post from Search Engine Marketing Pros
Pitstop Media is a Vancouver based search engine marketing company which offers results oriented PPC and SEO services. If you need help with your search engine optimization projects or with pay per click management and/or PPC optimization please contact us for a free, no obligation quote. We've helped companies rank on the first page of Google in a short period of time for highly competitive terms, and we've reduced paid advertising cost by as much as 148% while increased AdWords conversion rates by as much as 410%. Let us rank your website on the first page, too!

Related posts:

1. Acronym Tag and SEO – Complete HTML Reference Guide for SEO
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3. big and small Tag and SEO – Complete HTML Reference Guide for SEO

Almost all SEO professionals admit that the IMG element is important for search engines, at least to a certain degree. If your website is selling image stocks, then it’s crucial. But since almost all web sites depend more or less on images,  optimizing them for search engines (and humans) seems logic.

The purpose of this article is to describe some SEO techniques that can be used to improve image crawling, indexing and ranking.

We’ll start with a very minimalistic sample IMG element, as seen below, and at the end of the article we’ll end up with a highly SEO friendly tag. Bear with me, it’s a long (but useful too, I hope) article.

<img src=”0012adsds.gif” />

Unfortunately lots of designers and/or programmers stop with the minimum implementation of this tag.

How do search engine understand images?

Here are some signals used by search engines to read, understand, categorize and rank images:

- Colors, size and image resolution

- Image “bucketing”: is the image a face, photo, drawing or a clip art?

- Weighting text by its distance from an image and extracting context from text around them

- Overall theme of the website (i.e. adult websites will have all images labeled as “adult” and filtered)

- ALT attribute (alt content influences rankings) and TITLE attribute (doesn’t influence rankings, but provide additional context)

- Image file names

- Total number of thumbnail images that are located on the same webpage as the ranked image

- image tagging on third party photo sharing websites like panoramio.com or flickr.com

- Possible OCR of the web pages (see article Google Instant Previews, OCR, Page Segmentation and SEO)

As you can see there’s plenty of things search engines have to take into consideration when crawling images, and the above is not even the complete list.

A Microsoft patent that describes how images are ranked can be found here.

So, let’s go into the real tips, starting with the well known ALT attribute, and then continuing with more advanced stuff, like image EXIF meta data or dedicated landing pages for each image.

Always add the ALT attribute to the IMG tag

Just by simply adding the ALT text you will provide search engines more information about the content of the image and improve your chances of that image being indexed in Google Images:

<img src=”0012adsds.gif” alt=”yellow t-shirt” />

The only attribute that get’s indexed by search engines for the IMG tag is the ALT attribute.

Image placeholders are filled with IMG's alt attribute when images are disabled

The ALT attribute should also be keyword rich, not just a list of keywords. When writing you alternative text, try to think of how you would describe the image to a blind person in less than 25 words (150 chars or fewer). That sentence will be your ALT attribute.

Spacer images, 1px gifs or other images used just for programming or spacing purpose should still have an ALT attribute, but it should be empty, alt=”". All images that visually depict something important to visitors should have a descriptive, keyword rich alternative text.

Microsoft recommends: “Place relevant text near the beginning of the alt attribute to enable search engines to better correlate the keywords with the image. A copyright symbol or other copyright notice at the beginning of the alt attribute will indicate to the search engines that most search-relevant aspect of the image is the copyright, rather than what the image actually depicts. If you require a copyright notice, consider moving it to the end of the alt attribute text”. More recommendations for the ALT attribute from Microsoft can be found here.

Also, don’t repeat the same alt text with different images, especially images on the same page and try to use the same alternative text on images that appear multiple times throughout the site.

Advanced stuff: more and more websites started using a technique called CSS spriting to reduce the number of HTTP requests made to a server and thus improve page load times. While this is a great technique, the implementation makes impossible the usage of standard IMG elements with ALT attributes, which raises usability and SEO concerns. To address such issues please read this article.

Use the TITLE attribute

The TITLE attribute is not getting indexed by search engine bots and it will not improve your rankings, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t use it. The TITLE attribute is displayed as a tooltip on mouse hover in many browsers and can provide additional information to users.

Title attributes are showing as tool tips on mouse over images

So, anywhere you have images which are appropriate to have alternative texts, you should add a TITLE attribute also. The TITLE shouldn’t be a copy of the ALT text, rather it should complement it. Keep the TITLE attribute below 25 words (150 chars) and don’t just list your keywords in it, create a meaningful sentence.

Our initial sample can now be improved to:

<img src=”0012adsds.gif” alt=”yellow t-shirt” title=”athletic women wearing a yellow tee shirt”/>

Don’t underestimate the TITLE attribute just because it doesn’t influence search engine rankings. Read this article’s further, at section on providing the right context to your images to understand more.

Specify the width and the height of the IMG tag

Let’s improve our example a bit, this time with some non SEO related attributes, for better browser rendering (page load speed) into:

<img src=”0012adsds.gif” alt=”yellow t-shirt on a model” title=”athletic women wearing a yellow tee shirt while running” height=”250″ weight=”100″/>

It is a best practice to define the IMG width and height on the tag or on the style for better page load speed.

IMG tag complemented with HEIGHT and WIDTH attributes

Advanced stuff: for heavy, long vertical pages defer loading images until users scroll down and images are visibile in their browsers (search this on Google for more info)

Use keyword rich file names

You’ve probably noticed the unfriendly file name used in the previous examples: 0012adsds.gif. This type of names don’t help search engines understand the image at all and should be avoided.

Proper usage of image file naming

There’s really no information search engine bots could extract from that file name. Instead your file names should describe the image a bit. If appropriate, you could add your targeted keywords to the file name.

We can easily optimize our example to:

<img src=”yellow-t-shirt.gif” alt=”yellow t-shirt on a model” title=”athletic women wearing a yellow tee shirt while running” height=”250″ weight=”100″/>

For ecommerce sites, you should enforce some image naming rules, otherwise things will get messy pretty fast. For example, you can add an image ID to the file names, i.e. yellow-t-shirt–0012.gif. That is still much better than just 0012adsds.gif

If you’re not convinced about renaming your image files, Matt Cutts has a video where he discusses the importance of proper image file naming.

Advanced stuff: permanently redirect the old file name to the new ones, at server level (.htaccess).

Use relevant anchor texts to link to images

Wherever you link to an image (i.e. you link a larger size of the image) or you link to a standalone landing page for the image, use a relevant, descriptive and useful anchor text to point to that page/image.

For our example, if you have a dedicated landing page for the t-shirt page, the anchor text would be something similar to “Rate the new yellow t-shirt from {$manufacturer}”.

The above accomplishes two things: first, it provides useful information to visitors; second, it gives relevant, keyword rich data to search engine bots.

Provide good context for your images

Previously, I mentioned that the TITLE attribute is not going to improve your search engine rankings. The content of this attribute doesn’t get cached by search engines. However, this tag can provide context to search engines and that is important. Image captions or the texts surrounding the image do the same thing, provide context to search engines.

The description below the images provide context to search engines

Here are some things that you can do to provide better context for your images:

- Make sure that the content around the image provide search engines relevant information about it

- The text above the image should be an introduction to the image

- Add a caption to the image if possible

- Try to add an image-related sentence just below the image, as close as possible to the image, both as text or html code. the best is to use image captions

Here’s how our IMG element can be improved even further by adding a caption:

<h6><img src=”yellow-t-shirt.gif” alt=”yellow t-shirt on a model” title=”athletic women wearing a yellow tee shirt while running” height=”250″ weight=”100″ />Adidas 2011 Summer Collection </br> Yellow T-Shirt<h6>

<h6> has been used here as a sample implementation technique for image captions, but your implementation might be different. What’s more important is to have relevant, related text very close to the image.

Create standalone landing pages for each image

The above recommendation may not apply for most websites nor for every images. For sites that sale stock images for example, it is recommended to create dedicated landing pages for each image.

Clean, useful landing page dedicated to a single image. Source pixmac.com

Additionally, you can allow users to comment, share or rate each picture and encourage user generated content.

In case the same image appears on multiple pages, it is good to have unique captions on each page but keep the same alternative text for the image.

Create image site maps

You can edit your sitemap files to include information about your images.

XML sitemap file with supplemental image information

To submit your images into a sitemap read this article from Google. You will be able to specify information such as image caption, geo location, title attribute and license.

Add EXIF data to your images

This technique requires specialized software that can be used to edit images’ meta data. One can be found here.

While Google or other search engines haven’t confirmed if they use EXIF data or not, more and more photo shooting devices are adding data such as geo tagging, owner of the picture or orientation to the EXIF data. So, if a picture is telling search engines information about the location, orientation, and focus could they eventually guess what’s in the picture background? Not very far in the future, they will.

Editing meta data such as User Comment can be a good place to reinforce your image’s title or alt text (maybe with some small changes). Other meta data that can come useful are Artist, Copyright or Image Description.

You can use EXIF editors to change images meta data

Google Picasa already uses EXIF data, so it might worth testing how modified images are behaving in search engines. Also, keep in mind that some image optimization software can remove “unnecessary” EXIF data to reduce the size of the file.

Group Similar Images into Folders

If possible and appropriate, all images which can be logically grouped around a similar theme should be grouped into folders.

The t-shirt image is located under the /t-shirt/ directory that contains similar images of various tees

The advantage of doing so is that you will be able to add another keyword to the image URL and provide clues to users too. Not to mention that Google and other search engines look at the URL structure:

In our example you can put the image under /t-shirts/ directory. Now the IMG element becomes:

<h6><img src=”/t-shirts/yellow-t-shirt.gif” alt=”yellow t-shirt on a model” title=”athletic women wearing a yellow tee shirt while running” height=”250″ weight=”100″ />Adidas 2011 Summer Collection </br> Yellow T-Shirt<h6>

Note: you should place your adult (or other sensitive images) into separated directories.

Use absolute paths rather than relative

While the referencing type doesn’t influence search engine rankings per se, it is recommended to use absolute paths to avoid problems with crawling, broken links and 404 errors.

As a good programming practice you should use configuration files where you define your website root and other frequently used directories. In your scripting files use config paths to reference other documents.

Adding the absolute path, our example transforms to:

<h6><img src=”http://www.domain.com/t-shirts/yellow-t-shirt.gif” alt=”yellow t-shirt on a model” title=”athletic women wearing a yellow tee shirt while running” height=”250″ weight=”100″ />Adidas 2011 Summer Collection </br> Yellow T-Shirt<h6>

Note: verify that URL paths aren’t blocked by robots.txt and/or other search engine bots blocking obstacles (see below).

Images accessible through plain HTML

Don’t put your slide shows, zooming or other fancy features in Flash or pure JavaScript implementation. When using Flash, always provide alternative images with static URLs in GIF, JPEG and/or PNG format otherwise Google won’t be able to crawl them easily and they might not get displayed in SERPs.

Google rewards high quality images rather than crappy ones so try to keep his res images crawlable with JavaScript disabled. Most search engines bots can’t execute JavaScript and if the only way to reach those images is with JavaScript enable, the image URLs will not be followed.

When creating sliders, your image URLs (and all the text content in general) should be accessible to search engines in plain HTML.

Note: try to place your big size images above the fold. A good rule to define “big” is to allocate 2/3 of the visible screen for the big image. Below there’s a very interesting video on how Google defines quality images:

Don’t Forget the Favicon

A particular case of images is the favicon.ico file. It’s the small icon present on your browser address bar or bookmarks and unfortunately, even if you don’t care about it, browsers are still requesting it. If you don’t have one, your web server will return a 404 code.

Favicon files are requested when browsers load a page

Place this file on your website root and make it cachable. Check this article on Yahoo! Developer for more information.

Overlay text on web buttons

One powerful SEO technique for improving your document relevancy (and page load speed) is the usage CSS text buttons. The principle is simple: create simple web call to action buttons with plain color fill, without any text embedded in the image, and then overlay the targeted keywords as plain text.

Here’s how an implementation looks like on Google Docs home page:

The background of the button is an image, the text is plain HTML

The text “Try Google Docs Now” is actually plain HTML overlaid on the button (see how chars are selectable).

The opposite of this technique is what I call noise words reduction. You take “noise” text (which doesn’t contain your keywords) and embed it in images. For example, if you have an FDA warning at the bottom of the each page of your website, you could embed it into an image, so it’s not diluting your page theme with “unwanted text”:

Keep in mind that the noise words reduction is a technique used by spammers to pass email filters and it can be flagged as spam on web pages too. Use it at your own risk.

Include related images

Whenever appropriate, you should use related/similar images, such as thumbnails that link to the bigger version on the images (eventually image dedicated landing pages), crawlable CSS sliders, collapse and expand or other techniques you like.

See pixmac.com’s implementation:

The related and similar pictures will help search engines create relationships between images

They even have a dedicated landing page for related and similar pictures. That’s great food for search engine spiders.

If you’re linking to larger version of the thumbnail-ed image, here’s how the IMG element is going to change to:

<h6><a href=http://www.domain.com/t-shirts/yellow-t-shirt-big.gif><img src=”http://www.domain.com/t-shirts/yellow-t-shirt.gif” alt=”yellow t-shirt on a model” title=”athletic women wearing a yellow tee shirt while running” height=”250″ weight=”100″ />Adidas 2011 Summer Collection</br> Yellow T-Shirt</a><h6>

Add Snippets and Social Sharing

Provide a snippet for each large size image (2/3 of the screen size maybe) so others can use to copy and paste your images on their websites. This way you still get the attribution as original source for that image. Since you can control the alt text, which is the anchor text of an image, you will get more benefits if someone is simply hotlinking to your images.

Additionally, you can provide social sharing options, such as twitter, facebook likes or Google +1.

Take a look at how Flickr is integrating both, the snippet and the social sharing:

So, we’ve started with this:

<img src=”0012adsds.gif” />

And we’ve ended up with this optimized version:

<h6><a href=http://www.domain.com/t-shirts/yellow-t-shirt-big.gif><img src=”http://www.domain.com/t-shirts/yellow-t-shirt.gif” alt=”yellow t-shirt on a model” title=”athletic women wearing a yellow tee shirt while running” height=”250″ weight=”100″ />Adidas 2011 Summer Collection</br> Yellow T-Shirt</a><h6>

Now it’s time to go and optimize those images of yours! If I forgot something or if you have questions, let me know.

Pitstop Media offers ROI based internet marketing services such as SEO services. If you need help with your search engine optimization projects please contact us for a free, no obligation quote. We’ve helped companies rank on the first page of Google in a short period of time for highly competitive terms. Let us rank your website on the first page, too!

IMG Tag SEO and Image Optimization – The Complete HTML Reference Guide for SEO is a post from Search Engine Marketing Pros
Pitstop Media is a Vancouver based search engine marketing company which offers results oriented PPC and SEO services. If you need help with your search engine optimization projects or with pay per click management and/or PPC optimization please contact us for a free, no obligation quote. We've helped companies rank on the first page of Google in a short period of time for highly competitive terms, and we've reduced paid advertising cost by as much as 148% while increased AdWords conversion rates by as much as 410%. Let us rank your website on the first page, too!

Related posts:

1. Caption Tag and SEO – Complete HTML Reference Guide for SEO
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3. Form Tags and SEO – Complete HTML Reference Guide for SEO

Headings are used to structure the contents of a document by specifying a hierarchy of sections. They help creating the document outline for user agents. It’s also helpful to know that H1 heading is one of the most talked and controversial subject among search engine optimization professionals. And that’s for a good reason; the lack of communication with webmasters from search engines leaves room for intense debates. Add accessibility issues next to SEO and you will see why such debates will never end.

Before going into what SEOs, programmers, designers and copywriters should know about HTML headings, let’s go through some of the most common questions about them. For the rest of the article I will mostly refer to H1 as synonym to HTML headings, in general.

Tricky Questions about the H1 tag

First thing everybody needs to know is that, headings play a huge role into the accessibility of your website. Screen readers are looking for H1 to H6 tag to rapidly “jump” blind people within the section of a page. They can “skim” a page by pressing the “H” key to jump/hear from one heading to another. Considering this argument only, you should pay more attention to your document outline and headings.

1. Will multiple H1 hurt my rankings or is it considered a spam technique?

2. Is it ok to have the same H1 on each page of the website?

3. Is it H1 image replacement in the logo good/bad/spam?

4. Should H1 be the same with <TITLE> tag?

5. Is there any correlation between H1 and better rankings?

Below are my opinions:

1. Will multiple H1 hurt my rankings or are they considered spam?

Will multiple H1 tags hurt my ranking?

Most likely no. Multiple H1s are acceptable and if you think logically, there are valid reasons for multiple H1 on the same page. For example, WordPress assigns H1 to all post title on the home page (we actually modified the theme to go with H2, if you look at our blog home page). This myth has also been debunked by Matt Cutts, the head of web spam at Google, in this video.

Keep in mind thou that multiple H1 could trigger spam flags, as reported here.

Contradictory enough, Bing recommends that each page should contain a single H1 tag.

2. Is it ok to have the same H1 on each page of the website?

Same H1 on each page, good or bad?

Yes and No. Again, if you look at the default installation of WordPress you will notice that WP is setting the same H1 on each page, usually, the site name. But this can be good or bad practice, depending on your website theme. I, personally, prefer to put the single most important keywords inside the same H1 on each page to communicate Google what’s the main theme of the website (Internet Marketing Services) – see question #5 to understand why we don’t mind too much about each H1 tag on the same page.

3. Is it H1 image replacement in the logo spam, good or bad?

W3C uses H1 image replacement too

NO, it is definitely not spam, as long as you don’t abuse this technique with keyword stuffing or other crazy stuff. W3C uses image replacement, SEOmoz used to use it before the 2011 redesign, A List Apart does it too, Smashing Magazine also.

Funny, there’s even a website where you can vote your opinion on this subject.

Again Bing, suggest in the same document mentioned at questions #1 that each heading should contain only text. So, Bing doesn’t like image replacement? And since it seems to be a very strong similarity between Google and Bing algorithms [http://www.seomoz.org/blog/google-vs-bing-correlation-analysis-of-ranking-elements], would this mean you should not use H1 image replacement for Google? I wouldn’t worry about it, but I also tend not to recommend putting logo images with alt text under the H1 heading. I would rather put a text tagline below/above the logo and make it H1, rather than image replacement.

However, I am not sure if H1 image replacement is good or not from an accessibility point of view. Any light on this subject would be appreciated.

4. Should H1 be the same with <TITLE> tag?

No. Search engines tend to give less importance to HTML tags and attributes which are not visible to the user, because such elements can be abused. You can’t hide the TITLE element on the title bar of the browsers, but you can do that with H1, right? Thinking white hat (where you don’t actually hide H1 content) why would you repeat the same content twice?

The HTML specs specify that, Authors should use the TITLE element to identify the contents of a document and that The TITLE element is not considered part of the flow of text.

Hence, title and H1 are used in different contexts. TITLE is used to identify the contents of a document, while the other H1 describes the section of information that it introduces.

However, you should include the page targeted keyword(s) in both elements.

5. Is there any correlation between H1 and better rankings?

Yes, but not as much as you think of. Lots of SEO think that H1 has a great impact in rankings, but SEOmoz research claims (http://www.quora.com/With-HTML5-will-search-engines-penalize-you-for-using-multiple-H1-tags/answer/Rand-Fishkin) that there is little positive influence on rankings, as compared to using large font. But, wait! It’s not zero, and if it’s positive then you should take it into consideration.

However, one thing is for sure: changing the content of the heading tags is changing the document outline and structure. And that’s important.

Keyword Confidence with & w/o H1

The tables above are displaying what Bing is thinking about “seo services” terms relevancy on our home page. The table to the right had “seo services” in the h1 tag, while the one on the right does not contain the term inside the h1 tag. To get this secret keyword confidence report read this article http://www.pitstopmedia.com/sem/hidden-ppc-seo-gem-msn-ad-intelligence

Also, here’s an interesting statement from one of the recent Google Webmaster Central blog post:” One way Google’s algorithms determine the context of content on a page is by looking at the page’s headings. The way semantic markup is used throughout a site, including h1, h2, and h3 tags, helps us to understand the priorities of a site’s content” – http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/04/sharing-advice-from-our-london-site.html

Here’s what you need to know.

What designers should know about html headings

- Don’t embed headings into images

- Headings design can be altered using CSS; if your desired font is not browser standard you should use image replacement techniques such as sFIR to accomplish your goals

- Heading levels (1-6) should be differ visually one from each other, at least by font size, if not by color and letter spacing too

- Try to think how your design will be implemented in HTML code so the first heading in the code is h1 then h2 and then the rest. And just to start a debate on the subject, Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0 WCAG 2.0 (http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG20-TECHS/H42.html), accepts and even suggests using H2 before H1 for 3 column layouts and even suggest. What’s even more surprisingly, in the same document is also suggested that headings can be used to display navigation elements, which I think might good for human users, but I don’t think it’s good for search engine bots.

- Style your headings with CSS, not inline styles

- You should use headings consistently throughout your designed page

What SEOs should know about H1 and other HTML heading tags?

- Use headings in the appropriate HTML order. Using the appropriate HTML heading order helps users get a sense of the hierarchy of information on the page. The appropriate use of H1-H3 heading tags also allows users of assistive technologies to understand the hierarchy of information. – source usability.gov (http://www.usability.gov/pdfs/chapter9.pdf)

- H1 heading is the first heading on the page

- use the page main keyword in H1 heading of the page or if you opt in for the same H1 on each page of the website, use the single most important keywords inside it

- you can have multiple headings on a page, even H1 if it makes sense (see question #1 above)

- it’s not advisable to skip heading levels (i.e. H1 to H3), but you can go from H2 to H3 then H3 again, then back to H2

- Google will always focus on the content relevance rather than the HTML standards compliance or the technical knowledge of the programmer, designer or webmaster who wrote the code. So, anything that visually looks like a heading should be marked up as a real HMTL heading because it is more important to mark up headings as headings than having a perfect heading hierarchy.

What should programmers know about H1-H6 tags

- Every page within your site should have at least one heading, preferably the H1 tag

- WordPress and possibly other blogging platform are big time offenders: multiple H1 tags on the front page, H2 in sidebars, etc

- If you’re running a WP blog, the home page needs a different heading structure than the post page – read this article (http://yoast.com/blog-headings-structure/) to understand why

- don’t hyper link your headings (especially for Google News) to point back to the same page

- Use H1 to H6 to mark up the text for humans not for search engine bots

- Generally, it is not a good idea to hide (i.e. -9999px outside the screen, or display:none) anything under heading tags. This may trigger a spam flag or a human evaluation of your website and you don’t want that ;)

What should copywriters know about H1-H6 tags

- All other headings (except H1) are subheadings; they should thematically connected with the previous level heading

- Your H1 should contain your main keyword on that page, or site if you go with a site wide H1, it should be the same on each page

- H1 should be similar but not the same as the page <TITLE>

- Headings should be grammatically correct, logical, easy to scan and related to the text to follow

- Headings are one of the most important things to consider when for conversion rate optimization. They should contain your targeted keyword but also entice visitors to take action on that page. There should be a tradeoff between CRO and SEO

- Headings should always be subject to testing and optimization. When testing keep in mind that varying the heading can have impact on your rankings. Read the article on website testing and SEO to minimize the possible negative effects of doing LPO and CRO.

Hopefully, you are now fully convinced that you have to use headings properly on each page of the website, if not for SEO purposes at least for accessibility concerns. One of the main reasons for using them, apart from being good coding practice, heading tags are for screen readers, and it is very important for that reason alone.

If you were patient enough to read this entire article, I would like to have your thoughts on this controversial subject.

Pitstop Media offers ROI based internet marketing services such as SEO services. If you need help with your search engine optimization projects please contact us for a free, no obligation quote. We’ve helped companies rank on the first page of Google in a short period of time for highly competitive terms. Let us rank your website on the first page, too!

HTML Headings and SEO – The Complete HTML Reference Guide for SEO is a post from Search Engine Marketing Pros
Pitstop Media is a Vancouver based search engine marketing company which offers results oriented PPC and SEO services. If you need help with your search engine optimization projects or with pay per click management and/or PPC optimization please contact us for a free, no obligation quote. We've helped companies rank on the first page of Google in a short period of time for highly competitive terms, and we've reduced paid advertising cost by as much as 148% while increased AdWords conversion rates by as much as 410%. Let us rank your website on the first page, too!

Related posts:

1. big and small Tag and SEO – Complete HTML Reference Guide for SEO
2. Acronym Tag and SEO – Complete HTML Reference Guide for SEO
3. Caption Tag and SEO – Complete HTML Reference Guide for SEO

Frame tags, FRAMESET, FRAME, NOFRAMES and IFRAMEs are used to present web documents in other web documents, a web page embedded into another web page if you will.

The most common question amongst other SEO practitioners is Are Frames Bad for SEO? and the answer is yes and no. Yes, if you use frames to include your own content within the same domain name, and No if you’re including content from external website (which you don’t own or try to promote)

However, I recommend trying not to use them at all, unless you have a very specific reason to. There are few instances were IFRAMEs, for example, are needed to embed some external content, like advertising scripts, widgets or plug-ins. As mentioned, as long as the embedded content is not yours, and it’s not search engine manipulative (i.e. stuff keywords/content with NOFRAMES/IFRAME or some sneaky JavaScript redirects) don’t mind. On the other hand, if the “framed” content is yours, don’t use frames to embed it. There are other techniques, i.e. server side includes of POSH (Plain Old Semantic HTML) to do that.

There are 2 particular situations where you can be at:

a) You already have a website relying on frames or,

b) Your planning to build a page with frames

For b) I recommend forgetting about using frames as they only have disadvantages (see below). For a) I would recommend IFRAME optimization techniques (read the rest of the article for that) and rethinking your website structure not to depend of frames.

Keep in mind that as well as with any other html tags, you should first think of frame tags in terms of user experience, accessibility, usability and only then in terms of search engine optimization.

So, why is using frames such a bad idea? Below I listed some of the disadvantages. Unfortunately, I can’t think of any advantages, but feel free to come with pertinent counter objections:

• Even since 1996 usability expert Jacob Nielsen explained Why Frames Suck (Most Of The Time)
• It will be impossible to target keywords to specific SEO themed landing pages for your backlinking campaigns, since you cannot link to individual pages built with frames
• Frames make it harder for visitors to bookmark your page, or add them to their favorites. The bookmarks will always point to your home page, which might not be the page they wanted to bookmark.
• Sharing “framed” URLs  is impossible
• The content of an IFRAME isn’t part of the parent page and isn’t going to be indexed as such (if at all)
• Google tries to associate framed content with the page containing the frames, but they don’t guarantee that they will

If you needed more:

• Frequently, it’s not possible to print a page with frames
• FRAME, FRAMESET and NOFRAMES are not supported by HTML5 (finally!)
• The content of the IFRAM belongs to the site which you insert in the IFRAME, not to your site and therefore will be taken into account for rankings
• The content within an IFRAME may be spidered and indexed but no PR is passed through the SRC attribute

HTML Frames and Some SEO Fixes

It’s possible that you might find yourself in a position where you need to use a frame, and in this case there are some things you could do to optimize such pages:

• Add the NOFRAMES tag – almost your only user and search engine friendly alternative to frames – after IFRAME and FRAME tag. Your optimized content goes between the opening and closing the NOFRAMES tag. The NOFRAMES element contains content that should only be rendered when frames are not displayed and it’s the equivalent of the ALT attribute to render alternative text for IMG tag.
• Using the LONGDESC attribute (http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/present/frames.html#h-16.4.2 ) of the IFRAME tag may be another place for writing the description of the information you want indexed, thou no one knows if the LONGDESC is actually taken into account by search engines algorithms. Browsers (users) that don’t support IFRAMEs should be able to read and index the information contained within that attribute.
• If you wish to pass PR to the page in SRC, you can add HREF within the IFRAME tag, i.e.

<iframe src=”http://someexternalsite.com” ><a href=”http://linkedsite.com/linkedpage.html”>click here to view this page</a></iframe>, but to be 100% that actually the link juice passes to the source, you should add the A HREF outside the IFRAME too.

• Microsoft suggests (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff723938(v=expression.40).aspx) including a description of the framed content within the IFRAME tag, for better accessibility and SEO, i.e.

<iframe src=”example.html” width=”400″ height=”500″ scrolling=”auto” frameborder=”1″>

[Proseware is a producer of software applications and server tools.

<a href="main-noframes.html">Learn more about Proseware.</a>]

</iframe>

Additional Suggestions

• Based on the principle, if it’s not broken, don’t fix it, if you’re ranking well for competitive terms and the website is built on frames, don’t change it.
• Turn your frame content (especially navigation) into server side includes (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Server_Side_Includes)

Finally, but not less important, here are Matt Cutts (the head of Google’s Webspam team) and JohnMu (Webmaster Trends Analyst ), opinions on frames:

“Essentially, our search algorithm saw a large area on the blog that was due to an IFRAME included from another site and that looked spammy to our automatic classifier” – excerpt from this discussion

“I would generally not recommend using “frames” on a website if you still have this design decision open. Ignoring the hidden content in the “noframes” tag, a site which uses “frames” is always a bit more complicated to index properly (and to understand correctly). If you can avoid it, I would recommend going with a normal, “frame-less” design.” – excerpt from this discussion

Any suggestions, ideas and comments are welcome.

Pitstop Media offers ROI based internet marketing services such as SEO services. If you need help with your search engine optimization projects please contact us for a free, no obligation quote. We’ve helped companies rank on the first page of Google in a short period of time for highly competitive terms. Let us rank your website on the first page, too!

HTML Frames and SEO – The Complete HTML Reference Guide for SEO is a post from Search Engine Marketing Pros
Pitstop Media is a Vancouver based search engine marketing company which offers results oriented PPC and SEO services. If you need help with your search engine optimization projects or with pay per click management and/or PPC optimization please contact us for a free, no obligation quote. We've helped companies rank on the first page of Google in a short period of time for highly competitive terms, and we've reduced paid advertising cost by as much as 148% while increased AdWords conversion rates by as much as 410%. Let us rank your website on the first page, too!

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1. Doctype Tag and SEO – Complete HTML Reference Guide for SEO
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In the first part of the article we’ve looked at how search engine bots are reading a page built with table, why it’s important to know how they work and briefly explained the “table trick” to move important content at the top of the source code. In this second part I’ll discuss about the rest of HTML <table> tags, from a search engine optimization perspective.

Mostly, when it comes to the table elements it is web designers and the programmers who will be more involved with them, rather than copywriters or SEOs. The copywriter shouldn’t worry about how the page is built at the backend, he will need to just focus on the content of the page. The SEO guy has to look at the page when it’s done by the designer/programmer and see how it’s cached in search engines and then provide feedback to make required changes, so pages are cached properly. Let’s start.

<TABLE> tag

Table defines an HTML table and this tag itself can’t contribute to better search engine rankings.

One of the table’s tag optional attributes which can have a minimal effect on your rankings is summary. The summary‘s attribute content doesn’t get cached as text in Google and it’s very likely that Google will use it for rankings purposes, however it might be used for getting the page’s theme, that is equally important in SEO.

One could say, if <TABLE> tag can’t influence rankings, why bother? But, aren’t websites supposed to be built for users in the first place and then, search engines? Accessibility should be an important thing SEOs should to consider too. Providing a good summary offers insight to visually impaired user who might use screen readers, so go ahead, add a summary to the tables that need one (excel like tables).

A very frequent question I hear is, what to use, <TABLE> or <DIV> to improve my search visibility? The answer is, It Doesn’t Matter. Many SEO “experts” won’t agree with me, but here’s the cruel truth for them: search engines don’t care about how you build web pages, tableless or divs-only, php or aspx, they only look at the final output, by stripping html markup and analyzing the pure text content they can and want to read. However, from other points of view, I would recommend a combination of predominantly CSS and lightly tables, or, if you can build entirely with CSS easily, go tableless.

The use of DIVs and CSS can allow reducing the size of your HTML significantly, depending on how nested your tables would be. TABLE tags require TR, TD, TH, THEAD, TBODY, and TFOOT. This adds quite a few tags that can all be condensed into a few DIVs.

If you choose to stay with your current tabular structure, that should be fine in terms of SEO, as long as you don’t screw up your code badly (improper nesting, unclosed tags, etc). But at least you should semantically markup your tables. David Calhoun wrote a good piece of article on how to create the perfect semantic html. Here’s how the table looks like:

The Perfect Semantic Table

Read the article, then go and make changes where appropriate.

So, how do you know if your tables are screwing you up?

A good indicator that your code is ok and will be properly crawled by search engine bots is if you get no errors (or very few) when you run an html validation over it. The number of html errors can be related up to a certain extent, to the difficulties search engine bots will encounter while trying to crawl your web pages.

Another way to check if your pages are well structured is by looking at the text-only version of the Google cached pages. Take a look at how the paragraphs are flowing. Are there any words that are concatenated, without the appropriate spacing? Does your content contain mainly navigation/menus or other irrelevant data at the top? Going a bit further, do you link to the same page with thematically different anchor texts?

The cached version of the page should provide a good indication of your page status, designed tableless or not.

<CAPTION> tag

This tag has been discussed in detail on the CAPTION tag and SEO article.

Before going further with the SEO analysis of the other html tags, let’s talk a bit about html attributes. You can find the complete list of this W3C page.

There are optional, standard and event attributes that you can attach to almost any html element. Of the aforementioned, event attributes won’t influence the search engine algorithms since these attributes are used to trigger actions in a browser, like starting a JavaScript when a user clicks on an element.

Some of the optional and standard attributes are however used by search engines bots. They are getting cached and taken into consideration when ranking a web document. A great example is the alt attribute attached to IMG tags.

There are different types of attributes but the types read by search engines are %Text; and some other CDATA. One of the widely supported attribute is the title attribute which can be attached to almost all other elements but BASE, BASEFONT, HEAD, HTML, META, PARAM, SCRIPT and TITLE.

While search engines won’t cache the title attribute for any html elements, the attribute should be used for good usability and accessibility. Don’t abuse, provide succinct and good information and eventually include one of your keywords. Don’t add titles attribute to every html elements in your pages or on the <body> tag – this will cause the title tooltip to display on each pixel of the screen.

<THEAD> tag

The HTML thead element is used to group header content in an HTML table. The element isn’t required. However, any data that deserves to be in a table deserves to have headings, right? So semantically, you should use it. Also, an empty <thead> is invalid and it must contain a <tr> and the same number of data cells as the body of table.

The <thead> tag supports the title attribute, where you can provide user agents more information about the heading of the tabular data:

<thead title=”here goes the description of the table head” >

<tr>

<th>Month</th>

<th>Savings</th>

</tr>

</thead>

<TFOOT> tag

Similarly with <thead> the <tfoot> tag is not required, and it’s invalid if it’s empty. <tfoot> has to come before the <tbody> element (this is a bit strange, from what I read it has to do with rendering the table footer before showing a possible very long tabular data).

<tfoot title=”some human-oriented information about the data presented in the table“>

<tr>

<td>Sum</td>

<td>$180</td>

</tr>

</tfoot>

<TBODY> tag

If you use this tag within your tables you can provide additional descriptive information to users using the title attribute.

<TBODY title=”you can describe here what’s in the table body”>

<TR> …first row of block one data…

<TR> …second row of block one data…

</TBODY>

If you can, use the <thead>, <tbody> and <tfoot> to build more robust tables (i.e. sortable tables). This might provide some useful semantic information to search engines. Don’t abuse the title attribute on this one as you may get into spam penalties.

<COLGROUP> and <COL>

The difference between the two is the semantic meaning. The <COL> tag does not group columns together structurally while <COLGROUP> provides a more semantic meaning by grouping them with meanings. In other words, COL is used just for styling the tables while COLGROUP has a relational meaning.

They both support the title attribute where you can provide user agents (if appropriate) more information about the group of columns created with these tags.

<TR> <TH> and <TD>

The TR element acts as a container for a row of table cells. <TH> and <TD> are table cell elements and may contain two types of information: header information (TH) and data (TD). This distinction enables user agents (browsers and search bots) to render header and data cells distinctly, even in the absence of style sheets. For example, visual user agents may present header cell text with a bold font and speech synthesizers may render header information with a distinct voice inflection, while search engine bots may draw semantic meaning from TH and attach it with the data followed into TDs.

<TH> will communicate richer hierarchy to search engine bots and could be a good place to add your keywords, where relevant.

All three tags support the title attribute, which can be used to provide more information to users.

None of them have the means to alter your website rankings in search engines, but the way you lay data inside these tags may affect how search bots will read the data. The “table trick” described in the first part of the article, can be used to move content at the top of the source code.

As usual, if any of you have ideas or experience on altering html tag with the purpose of providing better experience to search engine bots :) and users, please comment.

Pitstop Media offers ROI based internet marketing services such as SEO services. If you need help with your search engine optimization projects please contact us for a free, no obligation quote. We’ve helped companies rank on the first page of Google in a short period of time for highly competitive terms. Let us rank your website on the first page, too!

HTML Table Elements and SEO – The Complete HTML Reference Guide for SEO – Part II is a post from Search Engine Marketing Pros
Pitstop Media is a Vancouver based search engine marketing company which offers results oriented PPC and SEO services. If you need help with your search engine optimization projects or with pay per click management and/or PPC optimization please contact us for a free, no obligation quote. We've helped companies rank on the first page of Google in a short period of time for highly competitive terms, and we've reduced paid advertising cost by as much as 148% while increased AdWords conversion rates by as much as 410%. Let us rank your website on the first page, too!

Related posts:

1. HTML Table Elements and SEO – The Complete HTML Reference Guide for SEO – Part I
2. Caption Tag and SEO – Complete HTML Reference Guide for SEO
3. big and small Tag and SEO – Complete HTML Reference Guide for SEO