We see them all over the web - on social media, various websites, forums and ecommerce platforms such as Amazon. Tags are widely used on the internet as a way to organize content into categories for easier retrieval. They are supposed to describe the content for which they are used. Using tags on your Strikingly website makes it easier for search engines and even users to find information on your pages and sufficiently gauge the relevance of your content to a given search.
Adding tags on your Strikingly website is really simple. The platform has built-in SEO tools that allow you to edit image tags, title tags and meta descriptions to enable you to optimize your website content with ease.
How tags work
A tag is an attribute that is associated with a group of content. It is used to describe the content it represents as in the case of a hashtag or SEO tags that provide an overview of what an image or text is about. Tags make it easier for web users to locate curated content and view the topics on a page at a glance. By breaking down your content into categories and using different tags, people are able to focus on a specific group of content that is most relevant to their search.
There are different types of tags depending on the use. In website development, for instance, HTML tags refer to keywords that provide instructions as to how a web browser formats and displays content. In SEO, title tags HTML and image tags describe a website element to search engines. This is particularly important because search engines do not see a webpage in the same way as humans do. They are designed to see text and determine content relevance based on the way a page is structured and the tags that it uses. A good example would be images and video files. Search engines do not generally see multimedia content but putting image tags to describe what the picture is about will give them an idea of its existence on your page.
We highly recommend that you add alt texts to your images especially on blog posts to optimize your content for search engines. This increases your site’s online visibility and makes it rank higher on search engine results. When writing image tags, however, it’s important to be more descriptive rather than stuffing your descriptions with keywords. Image tags are also important for visually impaired users relying on assistive technology such as screen readers.
Benefits of using tags
Tags on a content-rich website - such as blogs - can help categorize content and make it easier for users to focus on topics that they want to read about. It pulls up curated articles based on the niche or the keyword selected so you know that you’re getting content that is streamlined to your requirements. Having said that, tags can improve the user experience by allowing visitors to easily get around your site and target the information they came for.
In terms of SEO, the use of canonical tags (“rel canonical”) tells search engines that a particular URL or webpage is the master copy. This is particularly important if your website contains duplicate content appearing on various URLs as in the case of website content that is translated in different languages. Without a canonical tag, a search engine can flag your content as a duplicate and you can get penalized for what might look like the use of plagiarized content. Search engine algorithms have become even more sophisticated in the recent years due to the proliferation of duplicate content that are used and abused for ranking purposes.
