I have been looking at closely dozens of sites and blogs of supposed gurus, testing things on my own projects and listening to people who work with this every day. In the end, of the more than 100 tags that exist, only a handful make a difference today. It’s not 50, nor 20. It’s fewer. And Google interprets them its own way, not ours.
The title you put in the code, the <title>, is still your calling card. If you fill it with keywords like a robot from the 2000s, Google will directly replace it with another one it considers better. And it does this more often than you think. What does work is putting a single clear main keyword at the beginning and then making it attractive so people click. And forget about putting your brand if you’re not Nike, because lately Google even removes it from the results.
Then there’s the <h1>, the title you see inside the article. Many people make it the same as the <title> and that’s a mistake. The <title> is to convince from the outside; the <h1> is to confirm that you’ve arrived at the right site once inside. They should be different. And use only one. I’ve seen pages with three <h1> and it’s a mess that neither users nor Google can decipher.
The subheadings, the <h2> and <h3>, are now more crucial than ever. For a few years now, Google doesn’t just index pages, but it can pull a specific paragraph from your article and show it as a direct result. If your subheadings are well structured and answer clear questions, you have better odds of that happening. Don’t use them just to stuff keywords; use them to organize a story that makes sense.
Images have their own secret tag: the alt. It’s not just so Google knows what’s in the photo; it’s a lifeline for people who use screen readers. If you put “foto.jpg” you’re not helping anyone. Describe the image as if you were telling someone about it over the phone: “Man repairing a bicycle in a messy workshop.” That does add value, and Google loves real value.
There are three “technical” tags that, if you’re not careful, can ruin your work:
- The
rel="canonical". Imagine you have the same t-shirt for sale with two different URLs. For Google that’s duplicate content and it can penalize you. This tag tells it which of the two is the original, the one you want to rank. - The
rel="nofollow". When you put a link to another website, you’re normally passing along part of your “authority.” If you link to a page you don’t trust (a blog comment, an ad), you use this tag to tell Google: “Hey, I’m not responsible for this site.” - The meta robots
noindex. This one is blunt. You put it on a page and you tell Google directly: “This page doesn’t exist for you. Don’t show it in the results.” Ideal for thank-you pages after a purchase or drafts that have been published by mistake.
And finally, the great forgotten one: schema markup. This isn’t a classic tag, but rather extra code you add. It doesn’t magically boost your positions, but it can make your result in Google have rating stars, prices, event dates… It’s what makes a result stand out in a sea of plain text. It’s the final push for the user to choose your link and not the one next to it.
In the end, it’s not about knowing 50 tags by heart. It’s about mastering the 7 or 8 that truly give context and quality to your content, and understanding that Google is less and less an engineer who reads code and more a demanding user who values clarity.
