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. 

 

Title Tags – Are Yours Effective or Defective?

Posted on 08. May, 2008 by Boyd Norwood in Search Engine Optimization

Title tags are one of the most important on site optimization factors that will help a web pages ranking in the SERP’s. It doesn’t take long to optimize a title tag and the long term results of doing so can be hugely beneficial. So put on your moon boots—we’re going exploring! Keyword Research The first place to start is with your keyword research. I like to “clusterize” my phrases which means to group like phrases together. The short version of clusterizing your phrases is this:

  1. Decide upon the main phrase of a web page or blog post
  2. Type it into a keyword tool like the Google Adwords Keyword Tool
  3. Choose a handful of the most relevant phrases to be in the cluster

For a more in depth explanation on how to clusterize, read this post: Clusterize Your Phrases Once you decide which cluster is assigned to the URL you are optimizing, then you are ready to create an effective title tag. Title Tag Best Practices At this point, I want to explain some “best practices” for title tag creation.

  1. Prominence – Place your most important phrase closest to the beginning as possible.
  2. Density and Long tail – Use long tail phrases and/or a combination of phrases within the cluster to help increase density of main phrase as well as help the page rank for long tail phrases
  3. Use plurals and singulars where applicable
  4. Realize that the longer the title tag, the more diluted the strength of each word becomes

Let me give you an example that keeps all four points from above in mind. Lets look at a blog post that talks about a forex trading course. At the time of this writing, the title tag is “Forex Course – Forex Trading Courses – Easiest Forex Course Videos”. Here is the cluster of phrases that I chose to rank this page for:

  1. Forex course
  2. Forex courses
  3. Forex trading course
  4. Forex trading courses
  5. Forex course videos
  6. Easiest forex course
  7. Easiest forex course videos

As you can see, I put the main phrase of the cluster first to give it the most prominence.

I used two of the sub phrases from the cluster which, in one way or another, includes all of the words from each of the seven phrases in the cluster. Doing that increases my keyword density for the main phrase “forex course” and helps me rank for the sub phrases at the same time.

I used both singular and plural for the word “course”. Wordtracker showed me that “course” was searched for more than “courses” and so that is why I placed the singular version first—to give the higher search volume phrase the most prominence.

I limited this title tag to just 3 phrases so as not to dilute the density of every phrase included. I typically don’t do more than 3 phrases in a title tag.

Take Aways Keep all these factors in mind when you are creating your title tags for every single page. And yes, every page should have its own unique title tag.

Also, realize that these are just guidelines. Every phrase has different amounts of competition and there is no set way that works the best in all situations. Sometimes I find that one or two phrases works best and other times I use four or five. The only way to know is to test. Analyze your competition to get ideas? Yes…and then test.

Let me say it again in bold, you should always test different title tags to help rankings improve. If you tweak a title tag and your ranking drops, you can always change it back to the original title tag and get your rankings back as soon as the Search Engines re-index the page.

One last thing. After all this talk about testing different title tags, don’t get too obsessed. You ABSOLUTELY need to focus on BUILDING LINKS TO THIS PAGE. No amount of title tag tweaks will get you to the #1 spot without link building.