What Are The Additional HTML Tags?
You’ve already seen the most important HTML tags for SEO. But there are literally dozens of such tags that you could use on your site. Some of them are more important than others. That doesn’t mean they will be the deciding factor on your search engine ranking. What it does mean is that if you can include them, they’ll help.
Nofollow
One of the first tags you should consider using, as long as you can use it appropriately is the nofollow tag. This tag, which is represented by <rel=”nofollow”> is an attribute that tells a search engine crawler not to follow a certain link on your web site. For example, if you want to include an exam- ple of a bad site (like a hacker’s site or an SEO spam site) you may want to show that link on your web site. However, that link could reduce your search engine ranking because it’s a known bad site, and when you include the link to it the crawler thinks you’re endorsing the site.
To save face and still have a link to your example, you can use the <nofollow> tag in the URL. The coded URL without the tag will look like this:
<a href=”http://www.examplesite.com/”>Bad Site</a>
But when you add the tag it looks something like this:
<a href=”http://www.examplesite.com” rel=”nofollow”>Bad Site</a>
Your URL with the <nofollow> tag could also look like this because it doesn’t matter where in the link
tag that you put the <nofollow> attribute:
<a rel=”nofollow” href=”http://www.examplesite.com”>Bad Site</a>
Again, the <nofollow> tag isn’t essential in your SEO efforts. However, it could help prevent your site ranking from being reduced, and maybe even increase its ranking a little. At any rate, anything that keeps your ranking from falling is a good measure to take.
Strong and emphasis Tags
When you’re formatting the text on your web site, how do you format the bold and italic words? Do you use the <b>bold</b> and <i>italics</i> tags? If you do, you should consider using CSS formatting as discussed earlier. When you format a word with <bold>, the actual site visitor can see and understand why the word is bold. A search engine crawler, and a screen reader, cannot. All the crawler or screen reader sees is the <bold> tag. There’s no “emotion” associated with it.
A much better use of your HTML is to use the <strong>strong</strong> and <em>emphasis </em> tags. The <strong> tag translates into bold formatting and the <emphasis> tag trans- lates into italics formatting. And the difference is that when a search engine crawler or screen reader encounters these tags, it knows to pay attention to the word or words that are included in the container.
Those words within the container will also be given more weight. So, if you simply boldface or italicize your keywords, they will look just like any other words on the page when the crawler or screen reader comes through. But using the <strong> and <emphasis> tags around your key- words tells those bots to notice that the following words have importance and are more than sim- ply additional words in the text of a page.
Noframes Tags
Another tag that we touched on briefly in Chapter 3 is the <no frames> tag. This tag is supposed to make your framed web site appear to search engine crawlers as if it has no frames. Crawlers can’t read multiple frames on a page, and if you’re using frames it’s going to be much harder to get your site ranked in the search engine results.
The <noframes> tag will help, but it’s not entirely foolproof. Even using the tag, you can still run into problems with browsers and crawlers. Some crawlers won’t crawl a site even if it has <no frames > tags. So if you can avoid using frames, that’s always your best option. However, if you have to use frames, be sure to include the <no frames> tag. Table 11-1 shows the difference between the HTML construction of a normal page, a frames page, and a frame page with the <noframes> tag.
As you can see in Table 11.1, the <noframes> tag goes after the <frameset> tags. However, it’s still read by the crawler and in most cases, the <frameset> tags are ignored. The result is that your page, without the frames, is what is indexed by the crawler.
CAUTION
Deprecated tags are ones that are no longer useful. They have either been replaced by better tags or are not used enough now to be considered good form. An example of a deprecated tag (as of HTML 4.0) is <Center>Center a Block of Text</Center>. Because the use of CSS is becoming so widespread, some tags are being replaced by the style sheet. Be careful not to use deprecated tags in your web-site design. Using them could cause your search engine rank- ing to drop, because it makes the site appear to be poorly maintained.
Table summary tag
Remember back in Chapter 3 when we discussed alt tags? Those are the tags that are used to pres- ent alternative text when images are essential to understanding the content of your page. Well, just as you need alt tags for your graphics, you also need table summary tags for your tables.
The table summary provides web crawlers and screen readers with alternative text for the table. For web crawlers, this means that instead of seeing a graphic, the crawler sees your description, in which you can include keywords if they are appropriate.
Acronym and abbreviation tags
One last tag that you should consider using on you web pages is the <acronym> or <abbr> (abbre- viation) tag. These tags simply tell a web crawler or text reader that an acronym or abbreviation is being used, and what the full text for that acronym or abbreviation is.
The advantage to having your abbreviations and acronyms included in HTML tags is that if those words happen to be keywords for your page, the full text can be read by the crawler, rather than just the letters in the abbreviation or acronym.
When you’re using the acronym tags in your HTML this is how they should look:
<acronym title=”Search Engine Optimization”>SEO</acronym>
And abbreviation tags should look like this:
<abbr title=”United States of America”>USA</abbr>
These two tags, although named differently, do exactly the same thing. Thus, many web designers have gone to using the abbreviation tag rather than the acronym tag. No matter which you choose to use, it at least offers an additional way for you to include your keywords on your page if they happen to have an associated abbreviation or acronym.
Virtual includes
A virtual include is a tag that allows you to use information just once if it’s repeated often on the web site. For example, if you have a navigation bar on the left side of your first page that will appear exactly the same way on every other page, you can use a virtual include to repeat that navigation bar without the need to code the bar repeatedly throughout your site.