Concentrating on your website page headings...
- 5 November 2019
If a piece of text on a website page appears larger or more prominent than the other text on a page, it’s probably part of a 'heading'.
Text in the 'headings' is more likely to be read by search engines as keywords than text in the rest of the page. And the higher up the page, the more likely to be read by search engines. For this reason, it is good to include keywords in your headings whenever possible.
After reading this, you might think, 'Keywords are really important. If having keywords all over my page helps me rank for them, I should just fill my page with these keywords.'
It’s not that easy. Apart from leading to a bad experience for your website visitors, search engines are smart enough to detect these behaviours.
Trying to trick search engines is not a good SEO strategy, and sacrificing readability for SEO is not a good idea either.
Write good, relevant content for your visitors but be aware of and include good key phrases wherever you can.
Design your website for visitors, not for search engines
While keeping this principle in mind, it is worthwhile to learn a bit more about SEO in order to better optimise your site.
Page titles are one of the most important on-page SEO factors. They are the text you see at the top of your browser window when viewing a web page. They are also the title of a page that is presented in search engines.
Here are some guidelines for coming up with effective page titles:
- Include keywords.
- Make it fewer than 70 characters long. Longer page titles will not be seen in your web
- browser or in Google search results. If you make the page title too long, it will also dilute
- the importance of the keywords mentioned.
- Place keywords as close to the beginning of the title as possible.
- Make it readable for website visitors.
- Include your company name at the end of the page title, unless you are a big brand and
- people search for you through your brand name.
- Use different page titles for each page. Each page is an opportunity to target keywords.
The text seen as the description of a website in Google search
The meta description is not something that is visible on your web page. The short summary of the web page, which is usually included at the top of the pages source code in a description tag, is not used by the search engines for any search engine optimisation purposes.
What the meta description is used for is to provide the searcher with a short description of the page (less than 150 characters) beneath each result. In fact, if a description is not included in the source code, then the search engine will usually display part of the content from the page in its place.
Using a description tag does not directly influence search engine rankings. But it is a good practice to include keywords in your meta description because these words attract a searcher’s attention and indicate if a search result is particularly relevant to the searcher. For this reason, including keywords in your meta description can draw in visitors.