Heading Tags

The benefits of polishing up your headings are three fold – 1) they are a quick and easy aspect to change to influence your search rankings 2) a well crafted heading can inform the user that they have come to the place they intended, and 3) it can induce them to be curious and search for more information on your site. Here’s what you can do to get things in order...

When Google sends out its spiders to crawl the interweb, the spiders (most often called crawlers) pick up on headings and report them back to the Google search algorithm. Big letters on a page does not mean it is a title. The spiders are blind to all the cosmetics on a website and only recognize certain heading codes.  Use the h1, h2, h3, h4, h5 tags to specify the heading and the subheadings.

 Figure 1: How heading tags appear to the viewer

 You shouldn’t run into any issues if you keep these in mind. Most website editors do this automatically. Make sure you are using your relevant keywords in the titles, however do not overdo them or use long forceful sentences.

Figure 2: HTML code view of Heading Tags. The H with the follow number inside the < > are the heading tags. The <P> is used to specify the next paragraph.

 

 

 

 

 

Headings that help your content

People often browse web pages by skimming the headings generally before beginning to read the actual content of the article. So not only will improving your headings be beneficial to SEO, it will also give your website stronger chances of being viewed and read. Below are some considerations for making sure people won’t miss out on your important information, and then become enticed to read more.

·         Will my intended audience relate the heading to their own interests and needs? Eg. “An affordable ‘XYZ’ service for Health Professionals, delivered fast”

·         Do headings give an idea as to what they’re about to read or view? Eg. “How do you Identify Competencies specific to Leadership Roles?”

·         If you’re about to describe a service, does the heading include a goal-orientated outcome? Eg. ‘How can I save time to hire?’ these kind of “I” and “my” statements are also more commonly typed into Google!

·         Does the title make sense in relation to where they have most likely come from? If you have a link on your home page for “opening hours” then your opening hours page should reuse this text.

If your headings can represent the core benefit of what reading the page will bring to the user, along with the above you’re doing your content a favour!

To Do For my Business

        Make use of H1, H2 and other heading tags

        Use just one H1 tag per page. Google gets confused easily.

        Your headings have the most relevant terms

        You haven’t overused the same terms in headings

        A colleague has read over your headings and noted anything that sticks out or doesn’t belong

For Psych and HR

Remember the formality behind your brand and your typical audience when making title decisions. You wouldn’t pair big promotional or extremely cheap sounding terms if you’re trying to get across a feeling of a premium or high quality option. After addressing the main reason behind why they’re there and core benefits in H1, think about common terms that people look for especially if you have a lot of text. To help guide them to what they need to know you may use simple titles like “contact details,” “open times,” “prices,” and “book now”.

Now you have some great tips to get your pages starting to perform! To achieve specific SEO outcomes for your website please feel free to talk to one of our specialists, ring 03 9670 4275 or email [email protected].

Meta Tags, meta description tags.

In our last issue we discussed Title tags. Following on from that we can now look into Meta tags and description tags, which help funnel users to what they are looking for in search results!

<Meta> Tags

Meta tags were once the cheat codes for Google rankings. People once upon a time would stuff keywords into the tags and search engines would then rank those pages highly, regardless to if the content on the page was relevant to those keywords. Those days are long gone. Google and other search engines are smarter now, yet Meta tags can still play an important role in getting the benefits of whatever you are selling out to the appropriate market.

 “What are these meta tags?” you ask.

“They provide the text under the title in search engine results” I reply.

FIGURE 1: THAT'S A META DESCRIPTION THERE! PEOPLE TEND TO REFER TO THIS TEXT AS A "SNIPPET".

Not only do Meta Tags provide the text, they also provide Google with an overview of what your page is about. It is important to have your keywords in the description. Meta tags do not influence Google rankings, however as the text is under the title, it will influence the behaviour of the reader. Furthermore Google will not take note of your Meta tags if it thinks they are unrelated to the content on your page and will truncate the first paragraph of your page and use that instead. So as with the aforementioned title tag, relevance is key.  Meta description tags can be any length, however best practice is to keep your descriptions down to 150-160 characters long. Finally, Meta descriptions will not appear on your web page at all. This is one of the reasons Google now takes no note of them as people could literally pack hundreds of keywords in and still have a nice looking webpage about something completely different. Aka, spamming!

Below is what the code looks like, if you don’t have IT or developer staff to help there are hundreds of resources out there to walk you through the process related to the platform you are using.

FIGURE 2: AS YOU CAN SEE, THERE IS MORE THAN ONE TYPE OF META TAG...

The more observant of you will have noticed that there are quite a few different Meta tags. Different tags do different things. Often different web services will use specific Meta tags as a way to verify ownership of a website as it will not be displayed on the page. The key tag we are concerned with is the Meta description tag. It looks like this

<META NAME=”description” CONTENT=”this is where you type the content you want to type” />

Capitals are not necessary; however they are the parts that remain constant between all Meta tags. Another type of Meta tag to note is the Meta name= “keywords” tag. Google pays no attention to this at all. Other search engines do, so it is worth putting five or six key terms related to your site. Meta tags are located in the <head> section of the HTML code.

To Do For My Business

        All pages have a unique meta description tag

        Tags are interesting and compelling

        All tags are relevant to their page

        All tags are between 150 – 160 characters long

For Psychs and HR

As your viewers and potential customers will likely scroll through various descriptions very quickly, try to get to the point and avoid using technical terms as much as possible. You need to allow for further questions to be asked around “will this business have the right product or service I’m looking for?” and generate a reason for following through to your page. At first it’s best to answer what you do, what you offer and stand out with your competitive advantage.

Now you have a great starting point to get your pages performing! But to get real about SEO we suggest you talk to one of our specialists and email [email protected] with an idea of your site’s objectives.