Html Tags with Little or No SEO influence – Complete HTML Reference Guide for SEO

Instead of focusing and writing on a specific html tag and its SEO influence on your website rankings, We’ll list a series of tags which have little or no influence at all.

Keep in mind that some of these tag are still important for html validation and crawlability – i.e. if you don’t open and close the tag correctly, search engines could face difficulties indexing your pages. So, trying to keep your code valid (html, css, rss, accessibility) it’s generally a good idea, no matter what other optimization experts will tell. Peeking at your cached pages to see if the content is properly indexed, is important too.

And remember, almost nobody builds web pages according to the semantic rules of html, most of them are not even html valid. Therefore, search engines including Google had to “learn” how to rank documents based on how majority of page were built: non html/css valid, no semantic use at all and so on. Which means that most of the time they will analyze the pure body text and will not penalize anyone for a website which is not 100% semantically correct. However, you should always try to use these tag correctly, so the search engine bots can better understand the purpose of your site.

So, here is the list, listed alphabetically. If any of you know how to use the tags listed below to improve one website’s craw-ability, visibility and rankings, We would be delighted to hear from you.

– this tag has no SEO influence at all; it’s purely a design tag

– definition description (also can be used for speaker’s words in dialogs)

This tag is used to describe an item in a definition list. The text within the tag will influence the overall page’s theme, but there isn’t much you can do to alter your rankings by playing with the tag attributes, except of course, writing good content within it.

While there are arguments that you can use , and tags to bring your site on the search results for “define:word” type of results, I’ve seen no proof until date. If you want to have page with better semantics, use them. They seem to help somehow of dictionary-type pages or glossaries. Read this document to find out more about definition lists

– no SEO influence at all. Some search engines might however ignore the text that has been marked as deleted

– this tag is used to list directory titles and has no SEO influence

– the tag doens’t have any SEO effects by itself, however you can use it to alter the order of tags on your web documents, i.e. start your page code with the body text first, then the header, navigation and footer – this is a tricky technique and should be used only if other tactics fail. If you page is code heavy (let’s say 300kb of code) and only then the text content is coming up, you might think using the above technique, otherwise don’t.

Also, styling the div with the display:none or visibility:hidden and stuff your keywords in there will get you in trouble. The same is true for displaying your div content 9999px above/below the screen with the sole purpose of keyword stuffing. However, this is a white hat technique, if you don’t abuse it and is currently deployed on site like Apple for example, to work with CSS sprites.

Probably We should write a post just for using for rankings and how you could black hat this one to game the search engines, but that’s not the purpose of this blog – we don’t do black hat with our clients. White hats on, this tag per se won’t influence your rankings.

But, let’s be clear, We are not saying that you go the CSS way. On the contrary, you should use CSS and tableless design for other reasons: faster loading time, decrease the content to code ratio, print alternative views, and so on.

– definition list – this tag is used with and to define lists

Use it mostly when you create definition types of lists, like glossary pages, FAQs

Read this document; it explains when to use listed items and when definition lists

– definition term (also can be used for speaker in dialogs)

See the and tags above and read this document; it explains when to use listed items and definition lists

– the font family attribute of this tag has no SEO influence, at least not in terms of improving your search engine visibility ; however, the size and color attributes can get you into trouble.

Never use the same (or similar) colors for your texts and background, and never use small size fonts (1px, 2px, 3px) to hide text

– no SEO influence per se, but the other tags enclosed within it can hugely affect your site rankings.

Keep in mind that within the tag you need place other highly important html tags like , or and they do influence your rankings. Each of those tags will be properly analyzed in separate posts, so subscribe to our blog for updates.

Also, it’s important to know that improperly closing or opening the tag can lead to major crawling issues.

Do not confuse this tag with “headings” which are the to tags.

– no SEO influence per se; if improperly closed or opened, can lead to major crawling issues, so make sure you open/close it the right way

– no SEO influence and is the opposite of the tag. It can be used to signal search engine bots that some content on your site has been updated. However, the engines are looking the header response to judge that

– the tag is used to define parameters or variables for an object or applet element. It is used with tag and has little to no influence on rankings

– this tag is used to define a client-side script, such as a JavaScript. Some search engines had experimented with executing JavaScript trying to access pages behind such scripts, but to my knowledge, they stopped. Of course those of you who want to do some page rank sculpting may want to have put the links which you don’t want to pass link juice to, under some sort of scripting so bots can’t read and pass page rank. Keep in mind that Google doesn’t really like page rank manipulation, even if it’s internally on your site or externally by backlink spamming. rel=”nofollow” might work better than scripting languages.

You can’t play with the tag to influence your website rankings, however you need to be careful what you execute with the scripts so you don’t get flagged as malware.

tag is used to group inline-elements in a document. It’s a design tag and has no SEO influence, but if you decide to break other SEO important tag with it, i.e the tag, make sure you leave the appropriate spacing between words and tags. word_word, where _ means space

and – define subscript or superscript text, are graphic tags and don’t influence rankings at all

As We mentioned above, some tags by itselves can’t influence the rankings, but if they contain indexable text you should treat that text with the same importance you treat the body text.

Traian has almost a decade experience in online marketing and he is the founder of Pitstop Media, an Internet Marketing Company that provides services to SMB clients around the world. For more information about this SEO Company visit: http://www.pitstopmedia.com

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