Posted by Catalin.Rosu
Not long ago, my colleagues and I at Advanced Web Ranking came up with an HTML study based on about 8 million index pages gathered from the top twenty Google results for more than 30 million keywords.
We wrote about the markup results and how the top twenty Google results pages implement them, then went even further and obtained HTML usage insights on them.
What does this have to do with SEO?
The way HTML is written dictates what users see and how search engines interpret web pages. A valid, well-formatted HTML page also reduces possible misinterpretation — of structured data, metadata, language, or encoding — by search engines.
This is intended to be a technical SEO audit, something we wanted to do from the beginning: a breakdown of HTML usage and how the results relate to modern SEO techniques and best practices.
In this article, we’re going to address things like meta tags that Google understands, JSON-LD structured data, language detection, headings usage, social links & meta distribution, AMP, and more.
Meta tags that Google understands
When talking about the main search engines as traffic sources, sadly it’s just Google and the rest, with Duckduckgo gaining traction lately and Bing almost nonexistent.
Thus, in this section we’ll be focusing solely on the meta tags that Google listed in the Search Console Help Center.