Header Tags

Posted on 10. Oct, 2008 by Boyd Norwood in Search Engine Optimization, Uncategorized

When attempting to optimize your site for the search engines, there are structural pieces that become vital to your success. Certain locations on your website are more strategic for the placement of your key phrases. This is because search engines use algorithms that do not value all content the same.

Imagine a newspaper. When you are reading the newspaper, what do you do? You browse headlines to find the articles that interest you.  Once you find an article of interest, you might scan the article first looking at subheadlines to guide you.  We can all agree that the words in headlines and subheadlines are more important than the main body of the article.

In similar fashion, search engine bots read over the content of your web pages.  The bots tend to give more importance to phrases in headlines and subheadlines.  But what is considered a headline/subheadline to the search engine bots?  The answer is simple: Header Tags.  

Even though your page title might be big and bold and look like a headline to a human being, it is not seen as a headline to Google or other search engines unless it is turned into a header tag.  Those header tags are labeled in the code of your website, and the search engines look for those tags. Like the eyes that are looking for a relevant story, the search engines will place priority on H1 tags that cater to the desired search. 

You can make any text a header tag by simply adding a small snippet of html code around the text within the code of the website page.  Header tags range from h1 to h6 and the code looks like this:

<h1>Page Title Goes Here</h1> or

<h2>Subheadings Go Here</h2>

That’s it.  It’s not much code but adding them will help with your onsite optimization efforts.

How to put header tags into practice:

Put the main keyword phrase from that page’s cluster in the h1 tag for sure.  If you have any subheadings that are there for the user and they contain keyword phrases from that page’s cluster, then turn those into h2 tags.

Feel free to ask questions below.