HTML tags used for SEO purposes
Certain HTML tags play an important role in SEO and should be optimized. They allow you to structure your content and highlight key parts. They indicate elements that need to stand out to Google and sometimes to your readers as well. Oncrawl's crawler records data for these tags.
What HTML tags are used in SEO?
The main HTML tags that play a role in SEO are the following:
<title>: The page title that is displayed in a browser tab and that can be used as the title of a listing on a search results page.<meta description="">: A description of the page that helps search engines understand the subject of the page and that can be used as the description in a listing on a search results page.<Hn>: heading tags that help create a hierarchical structure of the contents of a page, wherenis a numberStructured data (Schema) markup: A machine-readable way of indicating the entities and relationships between objects represented by or discussed on the page, usually expressed using Schema.org entities.
"Social" tags for open graph and twitter cards: These represent the main elements of the page in a way that can be read and formatted by social networks in order to display an image or preview for the page when a link is used on their network.
Where to find data on HTML tags in Oncrawl
In your Crawl Report, you have access to the HTML tags dashboards:
SEO tags
Structured data
Social tags
The SEO tags dashboard, for instance, gives you an in-depth look at the <title>, meta description and <h1> tags across your site, with a focus on the following metrics:
Length: Titles and descriptions have historically had an ideal length in characters or pixels.
Duplication: Duplicate tags, or tags that have the same values on more than one URL, can signal thin or duplicated content. Problematic duplicated tags don't explain to search engines why two pages might look the same, for example, with a canonical declaration.
Not set or missing tags: tags that aren't present or have no value weaken the topical and importance signals your site sends to search engines.
If you click on any specific section of a chart, you will access the Data Explorer with the URLs for that section of the chart. For instance, here we have clicked on the red section of the bar graph that represents problematic, duplicated <H1> tags:
SEO HTML tags in cross-analysis
If you merge HTML tag analysis and analytics or ranking analysis, you can obtain interesting insights as to whether or not your HTML tag optimization has a direct relation to your site's SEO performance.
There is often an observable correlation between HTML tag optimization and organic traffic (see the SEO Impact Report with log file or analytics data):
.... between HTML tag optimization and how often it is visited by googlebots (see the SEO Impact Report with log file data):
...as well as between HTML tag optimization and how many impressions the page receives (see the Ranking Report with Google Search Console data):
Traditional best practices for HTML tags
Optimizing HTML tags is a standard part of on-page SEO. Here are some traditional best practices:
Make sure your title and descriptions are unique to each page on your site
Provide a title and description for every page on your site
Only write one unique
<h1>per pageInsert your main keyword in your
<h1>Avoid writing more than 10
<h2>Prefer between 2 and 5
<h2>