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.

How to View Source Code

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

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.

• Make sure there’s one title tag per webpage
• Class B IP address – Ranges from 128 to 191 in the first byte
• Make sure each webpage title tag is unique
• Never duplicate title tags.

Meta Description

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 Headings

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.

Image Alt Tags

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.

That’s it!

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.