When the campaign ends…paragraph and section headers for SEO

Continuing on from my earlier article the next item down on the list of things to pay attention to was paragraph and section headers. These are a very simple and effective way of letting the Search Engines know what words they should pay attention to and to give your keywords additional weighting on the page.

Traditionally when writing a document, you would put paragraph or table headings in bold and maybe increase the font size to show your readers that the title of the paragraph or table was “Racing Bikes” for example. However, for SEO you should always ensure that it is set as a header. Headers look like the below in their rawest forms:
<h1> <h2> <h3> <h4> <h5> <h6>

Most good Content Management Systems will give you the option of making a piece of text into a header rated 1 – 6 within the actual text editor. These should normally be set and styled by your web designers so that they are in keeping with your site’s look and feel. Generally speaking page titles are set as H1’s with every sub-category underneath that being a H2 and so on down to H6. I must admit though that I have never used a H6, at that stage you might want to come up with a different way of structuring your information!

When creating your paragraph headers, ensure you use keyword rich, descriptive text. So if I wanted to create a page on the types of services offered by Kent House with a specific focus on Staffordshire, I would structure the page a little like this:

Kent House, Staffordshire based online marketing agency – our services

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) for Staffordshire based companies

We have a great SEO track record for clients, helping them to achieve much improved rankings in Google, Yahoo! and Bing.
Work directly with our Internet Marketing Manager Yvonne Conway to improve your company’s search engine results.

Website design for local Staffordshire companies

Kent House have been designing websites for big and small companies across Staffordshire since 2001. Give us a call today to see what we can do for you!

And so on through each of our services…So remember when you are creating your pages, ensure you use set headers for paragraph and section headings rather than simply using basic formatting.

When the campaign ends…page titles

There is always a worry that after spending thousands of pounds on an SEO campaign with an agency, your site will lose its positioning in the SERPs once the campaign is over and you begin to add new content yourself.  Therefore I have come up with a guide on adding content to your site to help you overcome this worry and to continue the work where your search engine optimisation agency left off.

When adding new content there are 6 key areas you need to be aware of.

• Page Titles
• Paragraph or Section Headers
• Words in bold and italics
• Internal links
• Images and Alt Tags
• Keyword selection

For the purpose of this first article I will focus on Page Titles and how they can be “optimised” for search. Before I do that a quick explanation of page titles is probably in order. The page title is what you can see in the top bar of your web browser – it generally shows the website’s name and some blurb about the business or the site. It is prime SEO real estate and a very quick and easy way to improve your on page optimisation.

For a number of reasons page titles are one of the most important aspects of search engine optimisation. Firstly, because they are the first thing that is displayed when a search engine shows your page, so they should always be relevant, concise, descriptive and encourage people to click on your result. Secondly because they are the first thing a robot will see when it comes to your site and thirdly because they are a great way to get some more keywords onto the page and make your site relevant to the crawler for a search term.

When coming up with page titles there are several schools of thought on how to structure them. The two predominant theories go:

(A)    Company Name |Section | Product or Service
e.g.
ABC Ltd | Mountain Bikes | The Brilliant Mountain Bike 2.1

(B)    Company Name | Brief description of what is on the page
e.g.
ABC Ltd | Specialists in mountain bikes such as The Brilliant Mountain Bike 2.1

I personally prefer the second variant as it gives a description of your business which then appears in the SERPs, giving your company a more human face and encouraging people to click on the result. However, when done well either option will help your positioning and continue your site on its way to a page 1 result.