Headings and Title tags in SEO

What are they, and how should they be used?

There are lots of ways to build a web-page, and as time has passed early HTML v 1 tags have sometimes been abandoned in favour of other mark-up.

From a purely visual point of view the tags used often make little difference, but as search engines find it easier to read the code, rather than what the code ends up looking like, the choice of tag can be make a different to search results rankings.

The modern Internet grew from academia, and the early versions of HTML were designed around a set of simple tags that could be used to publish formal, academic papers. Heading tags were used to represent headings and sub-headings with 6 different levels of importance.

<h1></h1>

<h2></h2>

<h3></h3>

<h4></h4>

<h5></h5>

<h6></h6>

Other tags were used for paragraphs, ordered and unordered lists, bold, italic and underline, sub-script, superscript, and so on.

Before CSS and stylesheets, these tags could be used by themselves to produce well-structured online documents, as indeed they still can today.

Search Engine Optimisation

In order to rank web-pages, search engines first have to establish what a web-page or web-site is about, and just like any other document, the most obvious place to start is a document's title or primary heading, so using a single <h1></h1> for a main heading is a great way of telling search engines, (and your visitors), what a page is about.

Title tags

A <title>page title</title> is something that is featured in the 'head' part of the HTML code of a web-page, and does not usually appear on the page. Instead the contents of the title tag are usually displayed in the window that the operating system uses to hold or frame the page. These titles are also used to list pages in your browsing 'History', in Bookmarks or Favourites, and are often used as the title of a document when listed in search results.

In my view, Title tags are the most important in terms of SEO, and they become even more powerful when combined with H1 headings that closely match.

The text 'Headings and Title tags in SEO' features in the 'Title' and H1 heading on this page, and is also used in the site's navigation to the page. This combination should mean that, without too much competition, this page should appear pretty close to the top of search engine results for a search for the phrase 'Headings and Title tags in SEO', once it has been indexed.

[ 27-May-2011 ]