This post will cover all the wonderful things that can be found in the code of a website, whether it’s a site you are about to promote or a competitor’s site you want to learn about.
Before we dive into the information that can be gleaned from using the view source function, it’s important that you know how to use it: PC (Windows) users can right-click + view page source or simply use Ctrl + U, while Mac users can do it by pressing option + cmd + U.
So, what can we learn from viewing the website's code?
Key terms
A glance at the page title (title tag), its description (meta description), the heading tags (headings – h1, h2, etc.), and the alt tag – all these will easily reveal to us the target keywords the page is aiming at. Similarly, if you are in the process of promoting a site, these fields need to be utilized to formulate a winning description that incorporates the keywords you are interested in.
Title tag
Among the title tags in the code, you will find the page title, which should provide a concise summary of its content. In the context of SEO, this is one of the key factors influencing the page’s ranking in search engines and thus the title should include the main key terms it covers and targets. Recommended length: 50-60 characters.
Meta description
The meta description, as its name implies, describes in a bit more detail what the title tag summarizes, meaning – the content of the page.
The description tag is considered top-tier advertising space, significantly contributing both to the page’s promotion and its conversion rate in search engine results.
Here too, you’ll find our competitor’s keywords / integrate ours, usually in several versions, using synonyms, long tails, and the like, and direct the reader to take action. Recommended length: 155-160 characters.
Headings
Each page has internal headings marked in the code that contribute to the user experience in reading the page content. The main heading is marked as h1, the secondary as h2, and so on. Here too, you can often find the page’s key terms. However, most content writers will try to phrase them as naturally as possible, even at the expense of “missing” a mention of a certain key term.
Alt Tag (image Alt Tag)
The alt tag attached to an image on the page can also teach us about the target keywords of the page. The image is supposed to be related to the page content, and accordingly, the alt tag describes it.
Target Page
If the canonical tag points to the address of the page where the tag is found – then this is the target page.
However, the moment the tag points to another address, either within the site or outside it, we can understand that the page we are on is not the target page and indeed all the optimization done on it is irrelevant. In such a case, we enter the page that the canonical tag points to and examine its code (as well as its content, key terms, and the like) to learn about it.
Structured Data and Schema
Searching the word schema in the page code will teach us about structured data that aims to make it easier for the search engines’ crawling robots to understand the types of content on the page and accordingly display them in the search results. In the search results, this is seen through what is called a knowledge graph, rich summaries (which is my fancy translation of rich snippets or rich cards).
Languages
Identifying the ‘hreflang’ tag allows us to understand if the site appears in different languages and if there is a connection between the various versions of the site. In today’s reality, a multilingual site is usually stronger in terms of its presence in search engines.
