This is the first in a series of posts I’m going to write about making your blog more search engine friendly. There are a lot of ways to boost traffic to your website, but the method with the most “longevity” is definitely Search Engine Optimisation. So without further a do, my first article in the series, how to use headings to get better search engine results.
Headings are XHTML tags (<h1>,<h2>,<h3>,<h4>,<h5> and <h6>) that are used, funnily enough, to define headings. Because headings usually contain a thorough and dense summary of a page, in very few words, Search Engines love them. So, they’re perfect for defining the terms you want , and other search engines, to index your site under.
The problem is, semantically headings are normally used to define “section titles” such as the name of your blog, “Latest News”, “Tags” and other generic terms. While this is semantically correct, it means that Google’s going to be indexing your site for generic terms that are non-specific to your site. People aren’t going to link to your site for the quality of it’s “Tag Cloud” are they? And how likely is someone to go searching for “Links”? So why waste a header on these generic terms?
The approach I’ve adopted is to place generic terms like these, which people aren’t likely to search for, in a standard <p> tag, using a class as a hook for styling. I do the same for the name of the blog, leaving me with a <h1> for the description of the blog and <h2>’s for the titles of articles (both bound to be keyword rich). I’m also left with <h3>’s to use wherever rich data is going to appear.
Heading tags below <h3> don’t hold much beef with Search Engines, but I recommend still using them to ensure your site remains as semantic as possible. There is hope that we can live in a world where both semantic and Search Engine Optimised markup can live hand in hand, but we’ll need the additional tags being released in HTML 5 for that.
Austin Ayers
Migdalia Banks
Penelope White
seo
SEO India
Great article, I must remember that one for the side bar section titles.
I can’t say i agree with sing for the site header. I always use h1, would it be ok to use two h1 tag one for the sub-header and one for header?
Comment by
Grant — 14/12/07 @ 7:44 pm
Hi Grant, thanks for stopping by
You should only use <h1> once on a page, my recommendation would be to put the site header in a standard <p>, I tend to use an <img /> for the logo here and set the title as alt text, so people browsing with css disabled still get some element of browsing to improve their experience.
Comment by
Chris Garrett — 14/12/07 @ 8:19 pm
Nice start to what looks like it will be a great series of articles.
Comment by
Andrew — 14/12/07 @ 9:55 pm
Thanks Andrew
Comment by
Chris Garrett — 14/12/07 @ 9:58 pm
Thanks Chris, i am currently re-designing my website so i think i have a great use for the H1 tag. I have a small piece of large text at the top a short intro which i may use a h1 tag for.
Thanks.
Comment by
Grant — 15/12/07 @ 9:09 pm
Hey Grant, that sounds like a great plan. I’m doing something similiar with the H2 tag on the 449 homepage.
Comment by
Chris Garrett — 15/12/07 @ 9:13 pm
A heading sits above and introduces a paragraph, list, table, or form. It summarises the content that follows, for those that just scan the headings. It will use often use only about one to ten words. Headings should be assigned in the correct numerical heirarchy.
There is a tool that checks headings for you. It is built in to the W3C HTML validator. If the bullet-point list that it produces does not look like a summary of your document then you are abusing the heading tags on that page.
Comment by
g1smd — 18/12/07 @ 2:03 am