Learning HTML Can Improve Your Overall SEO Rank

As a serious internet marketer, I feel that learning html basics could give a slight advantage when implementing search engine optimization when it comes to getting your information ranked on Google. Fortunately, I know just enough html code to be dangerous and wanted to share some of these very easy html coding strategies that I use where you won’t need a fancy Word Press plug-in or have to hire an expensive SEO consultant to do it for you. Learning HTML ( otherwise known as hyper text markup language) code is extremely important and gives you a slight advantage in do-it-yourself blog content manipulation in setting certain HTML flags and parameters within your source code. Now I’m not saying that I’m even close to being a professional web designer, but I hope to persuade you to take the time to learn HTML and provide you with ways to circumvent your website or blog content to be search engine friendly.

HTML Tips That Will Help You Rank In The Search Engines

Over the course of time being an internet marketer, I’ve learned some pretty simple HTML code that only takes several seconds to implement. In this post, I’m going to share some of those techniques that won’t get you in trouble with the Googlebot crawler or with Bing and Yahoo. And remember, if you have any other suggestions, please feel free to share them here on the blog. Let’s begin:

Using the ALT flag for Images and Videos – If it’s one thing that Google loves the most next to writing good quality content is writing good quality content with related images and videos within your blog posts. And an effective way of getting Google to crawl your blog is setting your ALT parameter within your post to your optimized keyword. WordPress is great for setting the ALT HTML parameter because it gives you the ALT field when you upload images into the blog post. But what if you want to set the ALT parameter within an embedded i frame code snippet from YouTube. In learning HTML, I’ve found a easy way to add this parameter to your iframe code. All you have to do is set the ALT parameter to your keyword by typing: alt=”keyword” within your iframe code. To demonstrate how this works, below is an example of how to set the ALT parameter within an YouTube iframe code or any other form of HTML code involving videos:

2. Using NOFOLLOW parameter within your HTML code: Another great thing I’ve learned using HTML is how to set the NOFOLLOW parameter within both an image and a video. This parameter is extremely important in keeping Google or other search engines from crawling sites that could negatively affect your page rank. For an example, if your an affiliate marketer, you generally don’t want Google to crawl blog posts that have an internal link to a capture page for your affiliate product or service. This hurts your page rank by having internal links with no quality content or could be seen as a paid link by the search engines. With the NOFOLLOW parameter, you can easily prevent capture pages from being crawled and maintain your page rank within the search engines. This parameter works the same as the ALT parameter, just set the rel parameter to NOFOLLOW. For example,

3. Another great reason to learn HTML is manipulating the robots meta tag within your blog. What this does is keeps the Google crawler from crawling your site, but more importantly, keeps the search engine from even indexing your site within the SERPs (search engine results pages). Having all of your pages within your sitemap is not always a good thing. This could also negatively affect your search engine ranking by having links that provide no quality content for the search engines to crawl, which is never a good thing. By manipulating the HTML code of your header file, you can prevent this from happening. Now I will admit, WordPress has some impressive, plug-n-play plug-ins that can perform this with a click of the mouse. I would recommend the Robots Meta Tag plug-in. I’ll do a post reviewing this plug-in in the future. But anyways, for those who like to learn the intricacies of HTML, you can use the following code to change your robots meta tag within your blog post. Simply type:

within your header file. You will know when your in your header file because you will see it begin with the <head> flag and end with <head/> terminating flag. To truly optimize your blog posts, you want to set your robots meta tag to (index, follow) for post that you want Google to index and crawl internal links from your blog or say for instance you have a Contact Me link on your blog. You don’t want this page indexed within the search engines or have the search engines follow readers to this page. You will be wasting link juice and you don’t want to do that. Only follow internal links that provide quality content with a medium to high search engine page rank.

These are just some helpful tips to get you to learn HTML to effectively increase your search engine optimization by knowing how to manipulate the code when you can’t rely on special applications or plug-ins to do it for you. This goes the same for people who prefer command line or a pretty, user-friendly GUI (graphical user interface) such as Windows. It’s just a preference, but it will sure payoff in the long run knowing how HTML works and how you can use it to your benefit in getting rank within the major search engines. As always, if you have a comment or a questions, please feel free to leave it here on the blog. Until next post!!!