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 n