Month: August 2009

Having got the page title and description (the invisible bits) out of the way in my earlier post, it’s time to turn our attention to the visible parts of a web page. From both an SEO point of view and from the visitor’s viewpoint the most important elements of the page are the page headline and the paragraph headings.

The headline tells them what the page content is going to be about and the paragraph headings introduce the specific part of the page subject that will be covered in that paragraph. This is just good writing style and this is why the search engines love good headlines and headings. So how do the search engines know which part of the text is the headline and which are paragraph headings? That comes from a piece of magic called HTML.

HTML is the language of the web, web pages are written in HTML code or some variant of it. This code consists of elements called tags which describe how a piece of text or an image should appear on the viewer’s screen. The tags we are interested in today are the heading tags. There are six of these and they take the form <H1>, <H2>, all the way through to <H6>.

When coding for best SEO, most people will use <H1> for the page headline, <H2> for paragraph headings or section headings and the other <H> tags for various other pieces of text requiring emphasis such as captions etc. There should only be one <H1> tag on each page so as not to confuse the search engines as to the topic of the page, other <H> tags can be used as often as necessary.

When optimising a web page, the <H1> tag should contain the key phrase you wish to associate with the page, i.e. the phrase you want to optimise the page for. In order to re-inforce the optimisation of the page further you can use related or similar key phrases as <H2> paragraph or section headings. The collection of keywords so used indicate to the search engines the topic or theme of that page thus making it easier for the search engines to include the page in the result listings when anyone searches for that particular topic.

Ideally the key phrase used in the headline should be the same as that used in the page title that I mentioned last time. In this way the page title and page headline re-inforce one another and give a further boost to the on-page seo.

Next time I shall talk about images and how to use them as part of on-page optimisation. Later I shall go on to talk about off-page optimisation, a much larger subject.

In a recent survey I did into a very competitive market place I found that out of around 6 million search results in Google, barely 5% of the pages listed had a page title. So what! You might say, if you didn’t know what a page title is or how important it can be. Well, think of a library of books – none of which have a title. How would you know what they were about?

The Page Title, which appears in the title tag of a web page is a key part of the cataloging information used to determine the subject or topic of the page. Most search engines use this information to file the page. The other important feature of the page title is that it forms the headline of the page’s entry in the search engine results. Let’s take a look at a typical snapshot of a search engine results page….

Now take a single result from the list for the search phrase “Be Your Own Boss”

“

It looks just like a small classified advertisement, which it is! Its job is to entice the visitor to click through to the webb page it refers to.

The first line of the result comes from the page title (title tag), this one is designed to correspond to the search phrase. It says to the visitor, “Look, this is what you are looking for!”

The second and third lines are often taken from the description tag on the page. This tag helps to categorise the topic of the page in the search results and also forms the body of the classified advertisement in the results page above. By now you will not be surprised to learn that very many web pages also lack a suitable (or even any)  description tag!

So where do we find these tags? Well, they should appear in the html code of the head section of the web page among the meta tags. This part of the page gives a lot of information to browser programs and search engines but is invisible on the actual web page when viewed normally on screen. The page title also shows up in the topmost border of most web browsers.

Ask whoever codes your web pages to ensure that these necessary tags are in place. And don’t make the mistake many beginners make of putting the same title and description on every page of the website. Use a different set for each page appropriate to the topic and content of the page. That way you help the search engines to accurately catalog your pages and you will often be rewarded with a higher position in the search results.

These changes alone will not get you top rankings, but should put you ahead of many competing pages.