Search Engine Optimisation: Part 4

Search Engine Optimisation and Tagging

What is tagging?
When typing code within coding languages, we will often assign attributes to certain aspects of the website page, to help shape and define what is being presented to the user. Tagging is the result of this where the use of certain select pieces of code will result in a robot or spider seeing the information that is tagged with more importance

Why should we use tagging?
As was just mentioned, by using tagging we are allowing the spiders/robots to know that a certain phrase, word or series of numbers is the most important part of our page. That this select piece of information, which could be the title or a word in mid-sentence, has more meaning or importance than the rest of the page, not to say the rest of the page is not important.

What forms of tagging does a robot/spider see with more value?
The basic ones that everybody should be using with a simple HTML page are the header tags, which indicate headers and sub-headings within a page that has been published. They range from H1 through to H6 and can be altered through using cascading style sheets and such, without much effort, so you have no reason to worry about whether the formatting will fit into your webpage design, because you can change that.

Two of the least known tags are some to replace others, which do the same job but also indicate that they have more importance, than the original tags that they can replace. The first one is < s t r o n g > and can replace < b o l d >, it will result in the text that it wraps as being bold, just like the bold tag would do, but it also tells the spiders / robots that crawl through your website that the words wrapped within this tag, are very important.

The second of the two least known tags is one that I my self have just become aware of, and it is < e m > which stands for emphasis, and if you wrap your text within this tag, you will notice the effect is the same as the < I > tag, which makes all of your text italic. Just like the strong tag, it will be represented to the robots as something which has a higher value or more importance.

< s t r o n g > Hello World < / s t r o n g > = < b > Hello World < / b >

< e m > Hello World < / e m > = < I > Hello World < / I >