HTML is the backbone of any web page, but it also plays a vital role in SEO. How you structure and optimize your HTML code can affect how search engines crawl, index, and rank your site. In this article, you will learn about some of the latest HTML trends for SEO that can help you improve your site's performance and user experience.
Semantic HTML is the use of HTML tags that convey the meaning and purpose of the content, rather than just the appearance. For example, using <h1> for the main heading, <nav> for the navigation, <article> for the main content, and <footer> for the footer. Semantic HTML helps search engines understand the structure and context of your site, and also makes it more accessible and user-friendly. Semantic HTML can also help you implement schema markup, which is a way of adding structured data to your site that can enhance your appearance in search results.
In my experience, unless you're hardcoding you're website from the ground up, you rarely need to worry about Semantic HTML, unless you have a bad theme to being with. I've had great SEO success on Wordpress, using Oxygen. The websites are fast, UX friendly and there is a lot of flexibility if you want to manually adjust the 'semnatic html'. You can use the Rank Math plugin to implement your schema without having to worry about hardcoding it yourself.
? Structured Data Markup for Rich Snippets: Utilizes schema.org vocabulary for additional content information. Enhances search results with visually compelling rich snippets. ? Core Web Vitals Integration: Focuses on user experience metrics like loading performance. <link rel="preconnect"> and attributes like async and defer optimize critical paths. ? Page Speed Optimization: Minification and compression of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Attributes like async and defer prioritize loading essential content. ? Voice Search-Friendly HTML: Adapts to conversational queries with tags like <q> and <mark>. Structures content to naturally answer common voice search questions.
Lazy loading is a technique that delays the loading of images and other resources until they are needed by the user. For example, instead of loading all the images on a page at once, lazy loading only loads the images that are visible on the viewport, and then loads the rest as the user scrolls down. Lazy loading can improve your site's speed, performance, and user experience, as well as reduce bandwidth and server load. Lazy loading can also help you avoid SEO issues caused by large images, such as slow page load time, high bounce rate, and low ranking. You can implement lazy loading using HTML attributes such as loading="lazy" or srcset and sizes, or using JavaScript libraries such as lazysizes or lozad.
The best way to implement this is with a Wordpress plugin called WP-Rocket. The reason being is, it also optimizes other aspects of page speed as well. Afterall, if you're concerned with lazy loading, your main objective is to increase your page speed. WP-Rocket will also help with minify your CSS or removing unused CSS and deferring Javascript to enchance your page speed. If you are too aggressive in the optimization and the site breaks, just turn off the setting that caused the issue. Use GT metrix to get a benchmark of your site and then upload WP-Rocket and play with the settings. I've taken a site from ranking "F" to "A" within 10 minutes.
Responsive design is the practice of designing and coding your site to adapt to different screen sizes and devices. For example, using media queries, flexbox, grid, or other CSS properties to adjust the layout, font size, images, and navigation of your site according to the device width and height. Responsive design can help you provide a consistent and optimal user experience across different devices, which can improve your engagement, retention, and conversion rates. Responsive design can also help you comply with Google's mobile-first indexing, which means that Google uses the mobile version of your site for ranking and crawling purposes.
This practice, recommended by Google, can significantly impact user experience, engagement, and retention, ultimately improving SEO performance. Therefore, incorporating responsive design best practices into your website can help ensure optimal SEO performance and user experience.
As in all things SEO, you need to work out how important an optimisation is likely to be to your audience. If your analytics are telling you that most of your site visitors are using desktop devices, then optimising for mobile might be a waste of valuable resources.
WebP is a new image format that offers better compression and quality than JPEG and PNG. WebP images can reduce the file size of your images by up to 30%, which can improve your site's speed, performance, and user experience. WebP images can also help you optimize your site for Google's Core Web Vitals, which are a set of metrics that measure how fast, responsive, and stable your site is. WebP images can also help you improve your SEO by reducing the page load time, bounce rate, and server load. You can convert your images to WebP using online tools such as Squoosh or Cloudinary, or using plugins such as WebP Express or EWWW Image Optimizer.
I've seen PNG images with +10MB of file size and when converted to WebP and compressed, they have a significantly lower file size and the quality difference is almost unnoticeable. This format is widely supported nowadays by browsers, I highly recommend to integrate this WebP conversion & compression workflow to optimize page speed performance
In one of my previous responses about page speed and using WP-Rocket for lazy loading, it also integrated with Imagify which will compress and convert all your images to WebP format. I highly recommend using this integration if you already have a lot of images on your website. There is a bulk optimizer feature which will let you optimize all of your images in 1 click, and if you already have ALT text associated with the unoptimized image, Imagify will keep the ALT text when it optimizes it so the WebP version will contain the ALT text you set.
Webp is great but it’s worth thinking about whether the places you wish to share your articles will support webp. For example, if you set your featured image as a webp some platforms will not include your featured image when you post links to your articles. LinkedIn does not support the webp image format. So if sharing content on LinkedIn is an important part of your strategy, make sure you don’t use a webp format image as your featured image.
HTML validation is the process of checking and correcting the errors and warnings in your HTML code. HTML validation can help you ensure that your code follows the HTML standards and best practices, and that it is compatible with different browsers and devices. HTML validation can also help you improve your SEO by avoiding issues such as broken links, duplicate content, missing tags, and poor accessibility. HTML validation can also help you improve your site's performance and user experience by fixing the bugs and glitches that can affect the functionality and appearance of your site. You can validate your HTML code using online tools such as W3C Markup Validation Service or HTML Validator.
Failing to validate your html is like publishing a book without proofreading it first. Finding and fixing buggy bits of html is a process where the rewards can vastly outweigh the effort.
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