SEO practices

SEO Tip: Use Heading Tags

On July 31, 2009 / SEO practices / Leave a Comment

Almost all web pages have headings and sub-headings.

On this page, “SEO Tip: Use Heading Tags” is a heading.  So are “Almost all web pages have headings and sub-headings.” and “Heading tags”.

All too often, web designers code these headings with font information: basically saying “make this text large, bold, centered, and blue”. That works well to have the heading stand out for human visitors. But it doesn’t tell the search engines that those words constitute a “heading”. And we want to tell them that.

If we’ve got our keywords in these headings, telling the search engines they’re headings causes those words and phrases to be treated as more important than the normal body text on the page.

Heading tags

Heading tags come in six varieties: H1, H2, H3, H4, H5, and H6.

H1 is typically the largest and most prominent, and the other tags are usually progressively less pronounced, visually. If you’ve written your content well, you will almost always find your keywords in headings. Make sure the search engines know that by including heading tags in the code around those headings.

For a sense of how to use headings and subheadings, let me refer you to my blog post entitled The 7 Steps to a Perfect Blog Post.

Eight Typical SEO Mistakes … And What To Do Instead

On November 27, 2007 / SEO practices / 2 Comments

There are quite a number of common mistakes people make when considering SEO for their websites. Here are eight to avoid, and what to do instead.

SEO Mistake: Design and develop your web site without considering SEO.
Instead: Make sure your website design is search engine friendly, so search engines can easily get to every significant page on your site. Be responsive and mobile-friendly. Avoid graphical text. Do keyword analysis first, because often the keywords you find you need to target will influence the pages you need on your site. And they will certainly influence the content.

SEO Mistake: Use the same Page Title tag on every page. And include your company name at the beginning of it.
Instead: Craft a unique Title tag for every page, using the most important keywords for the page in the Title tag. Use your company name only on the Title tag for your home page, your about us page, and your contact page. If you must use it on other pages, place it at the end of the Title tag.

SEO Mistake: Target general keywords that are extremely competitive because they get a lot of searches.
Instead: Target more focused keywords. It’s better to rank #4 for “adoption lawyer” than #50 for “lawyer”. In the end, the former will generate more traffic to your web site.

SEO Mistake: Request links with your URL in the anchor text. (Anchor text is the text in the link itself that someone clicks on.) E.G., don’t do this: www.RankMagic.com.
Instead: Use almost anything else as anchor text, preferable a keyword phrase for the page. E.G., NJ SEO company.

SEO Mistake: Ignore your inbound link profile.
Instead: Recognize that your authority on the web is a critical ranking factor, and that it’s measured by the number and quality of incoming links from other websites.

SEO Mistake: When link building, request the same anchor text from all linking web sites.
Instead: Vary what the anchor text says to include your most important keywords.

SEO Mistake: Request all incoming links to your home page.
Instead: Request incoming links to all of the pages you’re optimizing. And make sure the anchor text contains at least one of the keywords for that page. E.G., local SEO for small businesses. Consider offering anyone who might link to you a choice of what to use for anchor text.

SEO Mistake: Expect fast results.
Instead: Understand that organic or natural SEO doesn’t happen overnight. It takes a minimum of 3-4 months to see any results at all, and full realization can take a year or more.

Bonus SEO Mistake

SEO Mistake: Optimize it and forget it.
Instead: Periodically check that people are still searching for your keywords frequently, and see if new keywords have become more popular. If so, adapt your SEO strategy accordingly. Also, check your rankings occasionally (quarterly, monthly) so you’ll know if they start to slip. New, aggressive competition and search engine algorithm changes might result in your rankings dropping. If you don’t check, you can’t react to it. Check Google Analytics to make sure your traffic is steady or increasing. If it drops, you need to fix something.

[Updated February, 2022.]

What’s been your experience? Join the conversation in the comments below.

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Click Depth and your SEO: Why You Should Care

On October 26, 2006 / SEO practices / Leave a Comment

There are many factors that can influence the ranking of a web page on search engines. A factor that is overlooked by many webmasters is the click depth.

What is click depth?

Sometimes called “click distance”, click depth is the number of clicks it takes to get to a web page from the home page of your web site. If you need 5 clicks from your home page to go to page A and 2 clicks from you home page to get to page B then page B has a larger click depth than page A.

Why is click depth important?

Some search engines (including Google) seem to take click depth into account when calculating the ranking of web pages. The lower the click depth, the more value is given to a web page.

In addition to the click depth, some search engines might also take the directory structure into account.

A web page with the URL www.example.com/page.htm is considered more important than a page with a URL that points to a subfolder: www.example.com/here/there/whereever/page.htm

It’s good to understand Click Depth for your web pages.

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How can you influence the click depth on your web site?

It’s likely that a clean site with less click depth gets better Google rankings than a site with a cluttered navigation.

An easy way to make every page of your web site available with at most two clicks is putting a sitemap link on every web page. Using Google’s Sitemaps service doesn’t help because it does not change the click depth of your web site. You have to put a normal sitemap on your web site.

If you use a normal sitemap on your web site then you don’t have to participate in Google’s Sitemaps program because Google will find all of your pages through your regular sitemap.

Where can I learn more about click depth?

Search Engine Journal has an interesting article entitled SEO and Click Distance.

[Update 2021] They also have a more recent article entitled Click Depth: Is It a Google Ranking Factor?