HTML Basic Code for Improved Search Engine Rankings

Posted • October 13, 2008 • Comments Off

Heading Tags – Key Factors in Search Engines and Web Site Usability

One of the most valuable basic SEO keys that is often either overlooked or misused are the rules for heading tags.

Heading tags not only give keys to the search engines about the web-page but even more importantly they should give your reader a way to quickly scan the page and understand why they should read it.

The syntax for heading tags are:
<h1>Main Topic</h>
<h2>Sub Topic Related to Main Topic</h2>
<h3>Sub Topic Related to Sub Topic h2</h3>

Here are my eleven rules for the use heading tags in a web-page for both web site usability and SEO.

1. Each page must have at least one heading.
2. Each page is allowed only one H1 heading.
3. The H1 heading is always the first heading on the page.
4. The main keyword or keyword phrase is used in that H1 heading.
5. Use headings like you would in an outline, use CSS to style your text.
6. Don’t skip heading levels use them in numerical order (e.g. H1, H2, H3) although you can use multiple H2s H3s and so on.
7. All headings except H1 are subheadings, they should support the main heading and be thematically connected with the previous level headings.
8. Use headings consistently throughout the whole web site.
9. Headings should be simple, concise, easily scanned, and it wouldn’t hurt if they contained some of your keywords or keyword phrases.
10. The headings should actually represent the summary of the text.
11. If you actually extracted the headings and made an outline with them they should actually make sense.

The tool I use to check the heading tags on a page is an add-on for Firefox.
This tool is the Web Developer add-on by Chris Pederick. There are many more uses for this Firefox add-on than just checking out heading tags.

Late,
Gary Pool

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