Correlational tools, such as Cora, indicate that HTML tags affect rank. Last month, we began to look at HTML tags and found that we could not index a page with a keyword that was only present in an HTML ID or Classes. When it comes to rank, that’s a bad sign. Generally speaking, you can index a page with a factor. As we want to find out for sure, we are moving forward with testing whether HTML IDs or Classes will affect rank.
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If you play with tools like Cora or other kind of tools that are doing on-page analysis that are higher on page analysis tools, what you’ll find is that html tags seem to affect rank. Last month, we looked at if we can index a page with keywords that just appear in tags. These are the html tags, they are not visible to humans, they are not in paragraph text, for example, they are just a keyword in an html tag. We couldn’t get it to index and so that indicated that maybe this was not a ranking factor but we decided to move it forward because we see it so much with these other tools and that you could actually tweak it and it affects rank so we went forward to try it out. In this test, we had two different tests going. One with IDs and one with classes. This is what it looks like - <div id = “keyword” > usually it is descriptive of what perhaps the text will look like, whatever the image or kind of thing that is going on. In this case, we are just naming it a keyword and we ran it with both IDs and classes and how this was set up was that, the number 3 ranking page received 10 IDs with the target keyword or 10 classes with the target keyword on it. Then we ran up the flagpole to see what would happen. With classes, the page moved to number 1. That was pretty awesome. With IDs, it didn’t. There were no movement. This is pretty sweet. We can confirm that html tags affect rank but it is not all of them. There are certain things that Google will be looking at. What we are seeing here is perhaps not IDs but perhaps classes. The other thing we know though is you can’t just stuff your html with a particular keyword, it must also be on the page. The page itself must be optimized for that particular keyword and then you could get this edge. It is pretty massive and I do not know the level of how low the optimization level needs to be, if you will but at some point, the page needs to be optimized for that keyword but then you could get things in your html.
This is something to look at in situations of – how are these guys ranking. You look at it and maybe their backlink profile is just ok, their onpage is fine but they seem to be ranking very very well, it is important to have a way to check their html. There is a good chance that they are doing a lot there. So I would give that a go but we can confirm that html tags will affect rank, not all of them, and we also know that the page needs to be optimized for that particular keyword, for this to work.