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Use your HTML tags properly

Author devsteve

The myriad of tags that HTML offers are for far more than just styling up a page. Infact, styling up a page should be the farthest thing from your mind when deciding which tag to use for a particular instance. Far too often, I see tags abused and misused, and this misuse of tags can do nothing but harm your search engine placement, especially for a young site that doesn’t have the weight of years to boost it’s placement.

Here are some tips to get the most out of your elements and help the search engines properly identify and categorize your content:

• Never use <h1>-<h6> elements, unless you are making a header element. If you want large text, use a <span> or <div> and give it a ‘class’ element with some associated CSS stylings to make it big. Using the header tags makes a spider think that is a header and gives it greater weight. Do you really want a site about dog breeding to be categorized under the title ‘Now serving 4 states in the southwest United States!’ when you just wanted that text to be large? If you need help figuring out if your use of headers makes sense, try this experiment…remove everything from your page, except the header elements. Does the page look like a proper table of contents? If the answer is no, then consider changing some out into <div> or <span> tags.
• Avoid tables! I can’t stress this enough. Let me repeat that a few times…tables are bad. Tables should not be used. Tables are not proper search engine optimization. A table does not tell a search engine how data relates to other pieces of the document. There are exceptions to this rule, but they are often self apparent. If you can’t take the table and put it into a spreadsheet and have it still make sense, it’s no good. The top row should be header elements and each row after should be a record of data with each column matching its header element. The use of <div> based layouts with a heavy reliance on CSS is not only far more coherent for search engines, but also far more flexible for design changes. If you contact a company to build a website for you, make sure to ask if they use table based designs. If so, run to the hills. Or better yet, run to USA SEO Pros, a company that I can confirm does not use table based designs.
• The <label> tag is an underused element that helps spiders figure out what a form is all about. Each<label> is tied to a single form element through the ‘for’ attribute on the label and the ‘id’ attribute on the form element. You can get quite attractive forms by placing a <label> and <input> inside of a <span> and using some CSS on each element. The span will define the overall size and placement of the <label>/<input> combo, and the CSS on the <label> and <input> can be used to align those properly within the <span>.
• Another underused set of elements is the <dl>/<dt>/<dd> tags. These are used for defining objects on the page..
  • <dl> is the definition list, which will be the wrapper around the <dt> and <dd>
  • <dt> is definition term. It is usually something short and sweet, like “Name” or “Address”.
  • <dd> is the definition definition. The <dd> that immediately follows the <dt> is assumed to be it’s definition. For instance…<dt>Username</dt><dd>devsteve</dd> would be used to define the username as devsteve.
• Try to avoid the <br /> tag as much as possible. The break tag is merely used to jump to the next line, which should never be needed if these other tags are properly used with good CSS. <p> tags wrap a paragraph and do an automatic line break at the end, <div> tags have an automatic line break. Any element with the CSS value ‘display:block;’ has a line break. The <br /> tag is forcing an action that should be smooth and automatic.
• Do not touch the <font> tag! Unlike my advice against using <table>, this one is absolute. There is no exception to this rule. There is no ‘but sometimes its okay’. There is nothing but a slap on the wrist over this one. The <font> tag never should’ve existed in the first place. HTML is not about defining how something looks. The aesthetic qualities of HTML, such as the large font sizes for an <h1> or the bulleted attributes of an <li> were put in place as mere placeholders. CSS is about styling HTML, the HTML itself is defining data. A <ul> tag with its accompanying <li> tags merely says it is a list of items that are not particularly ordered. The font tag tries to place style attributes into the HTML, and that is bad. That is very bad. Anytime you plan to use a <font> tag to style up some text, use <span> instead. Give this span a class, give this class some style. You’ll have more options than <font> and you won’t have people scoff at your work.
  

I rampantly mention CSS through this list, so for those of you unaware of what CSS is, I highly recommend W3Schools to learn the basics. This site also provides good info on the HTML tags I’ve listed above.