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The internet is extremely and exhaustively competitive and websites are engaged in a race to stay ahead of the pack. One of the tools used for spying is to get source code of webpage of competitors’ websites. It’s like if you are running or cycling you keep looking in front and over your shoulders to see how you are faring. It’s also helpful to check the source code of your own website. As this is what the search engines read.
Underneath all the nice images, sliders, menus, titles and content lies the source code. This is the heart of every website. This is what the search engines look at when they examine and evaluate a website. If you are a webmaster or website owner it’s good to have a rudimentary understanding of the source code. SEOs know the importance of the source code and know how to set it up, make changes to it and optimize it.
There are several ways of viewing the source code of a website. Every web browser allows you to do this. Open the website in a search browser and right click on any empty space in it. You will see the option ‘View source code’. Click on it and the source code of the web page or site that you have landed on will be displayed in a new tab. If you know HTML you will be able to understand the source code and see how it’s structured and written.
Title tags are the holy grail of website SEO. You know the results that Google shows when you are searching for something on the internet? That piece of information that’s used by Google and other search engines to display your website comes from the title tag. If your site does not have a title tag it won’t show up in any search engines results.
Google identifies the words used in the title tag as important keywords to use in a user’s search. If you want a webpage to rank on a certain subject matter, you must make sure that the title tag describes this.
Here are some important points to remember on title tags.
The next most important part of your website’s head section is the meta description. This consists of a 160 character snippet that gets displayed right under the title content of your website. There are any numbers of websites that completely ignore this. In such case like Google will pick up the first 160 characters from the landing page’s content and display it.
Therefore make sure your web pages have meta descriptions and again make sure it’s not duplicated across the pages. A lot of users read the meta description that’s displayed in the search engines results and they decide whether to open the site or not based on what they have read. The better and more powerful the description is the more visitors you can expect to visit your website.
H1 heading carry very little weight in optimizing a website. It’s sufficient to say that just make sure that an H1 heading doesn’t appear more than once on a web page.
These tags are important if you are running an ecommerce site. You can’t display the image of an item without it. The product brand name and serial number should be in the image alt tag.
But don’t overdo it as it might be considered as ‘stuffing’ by search engines. Decorative items don’t need tags.
We have not ventured into discussing links and installation of Google Analytics. We have only discusses the important aspects of a website’s source code. Only the portions that are inspected by Google and other search engines and used in evaluating and ranking your website have been explained.
You can get download website source code software or learn how to edit source code in safari. But that depends on your personal preferences.
On any search browser, go to smallseotoolz.net and click on the ‘Browse More Tools’ button. Scroll down the SEO tools till you spot ‘Get Source Code of Webpage’ and click on it. it will ask you to enter the URL of the website. Once you enter that it will display the source code of the website.
Now you can scroll up and down the code and find what you are looking for. Of course you can make notes from it but you cannot make any changes to it. the reason is that the tool has picked up an image of the source code and is displaying it.
To make changes to the source code you will have to get your website developer or SEO to make the necessary changes.
Viewing your own site’s source code and that of your main competitor’s will give you a better understanding of how to strengthen and improve your website. You may have missed out some important points and by studying the source code you may decide to incorporate them. For example, you may have forgotten the fact that the meta description plays an important role in ranking of your website and its impact on viewers.
SEOs know the roles of these tags but at times they forget to utilize them properly. Use keywords judiciously in title and description tags. Never overuse them in any portion of a website. Repeated keywords raise alarm bells among search engines.
In case your website is giving any problems sit down with your site developer and make sure they are removed. That’s the developer’s job and you cannot afford to ruin your reputation because he or she has done a sloppy job. So as a website owner it’s useful for you to know how to look at source code of your site and the important elements in it.