Why HTML TAGS are important in 2016 for SEO
If you want to improve the visibility of your website, increase traffic and boost your brand’s revenue, you need to run a strong SEO campaign.
While building backlinks, developing your social media presence, and other off-site practices are great for boosting your site’s rankings, on-page optimization is still incredibly important.
Arguably, one of the most crucial aspects of on-page SEO is tags. Whether it’s title tags, header tags, meta tags or blog post tags, they have been demonstrated to increase traffic and boost engagement.
However, are they still as important and effective in 2016 as they have been in the past? In this article, we’ll take a look at the role of tags of every type, and explore their impact on SEO in 2016.
Title Tags
As you probably know, title tags are used by search engines (in part) to determine a page’s topic, and are also displayed in SERPs.
A good title tag will demonstrate what the user can expect from the page before they actually click. In this way, they are a strong determiner of click-through rates. But how do they affect your site’s SEO?
How Important are Title Tags in 2016 for SEO?
For many years, title tags have been considered one of the most important factors of on-page SEO. In fact, in the past, title tags were seen by many as only second to good ol’ fashioned keyword stuffing in terms of importance. But are they as important in 2016?
On 2016 Google’s shift toward semantic search could affect the relative importance of the title tag. The researchers found that a keyword-optimized title tag was associated with a better ranking, but that the correlation was smaller than it once was.
Findings suggest that Google no longer requires your title tag to include an exact keyword in order to interpret a page’s subject matter. For example, if you type “how to start a business” into Google, only six out of the ten top pages include an exact match keyword in their title tag.
That said, search engines will still compare your title tag to other content on your page, to ensure keyword consistency when indexing and ranking web pages, still making them an essential part of SEO.
In other words, title tags are still an important part of on-site SEO, but they are far from the be-all and end-all.
To get the most out of your SEO strategy, you need to use tags. Optimizing your content with relevant and useful tags will improve the visitor experience and boost your rankings, let one of our SEO experts analyze your website and generate a custom SEO strategy to rank your website contact us here.
