Getting Started With SEO (part 5)

There is a lot of discussion suggesting that spiders read only first portion of your page. Remember that spiders don't actually look at your page with eyes like you and I do. They only read through the page's coding electronically. This is why it is important to use good coding technique so the spider fully understands what you are trying to do and doesn't stumble over errors. The general concensus seems to be that only about the first 36 to 50 lines of code are fully considered. My experience has shown that best results occur when the good stuff in contained in the top portion of the page, but I have also found that additional keywords farther down can help too. It would appear that it is best to consider the whole page but work hardest on the top portion.

If the top part of the page is more important, and especially if only the top so many lines actually count at all, then you need to seriously think about extraneous code inserted by WYSIWYG editors like Front Page and Dreamweaver, and how much some of those JavaScripts that produce special effects are really costing you. Is right-click disable really worth 20 lines? One thing you can do with most JavaScript (and CSS Style Sheets) is to move them off the page and link to them with a single line.

Let's look at page content. We'll consider layout, tables and such in a later post.

Heading Tags

The "title", as we've discovered, is a part of the HEAD section of the HTML document and doesn't actually show as part of your web page. Within the content section of your page (the BODY) titles are called "headings". They have their own tags:

<h1> ... </h1>
<h2> ... </h2>
<h3> ... </h3>
<h4> ... </h4>
<h5> ... </h5>
<h6> ... </h6>

The "h" stands for "heading". These are heading tags and denote heading levels of importance. There are six pairs of tags, numbered 1 through 6. Each represents a different importance, or weight, of heading. The main heading on a page would be h1, a secondary heading would be h2 and the heading with the lowest importance in the pecking order of headings would be h6. Now it may come to you as a surprise that heading tags really have nothing to do with the SIZE of the heading text. I've heard it said often times that search engines like "importance" or "prominence" of things and so if you make them larger font sizes they will get more weight in the search engine evaluations. This is a mixed bag of information that really should be sorted out.

Let's look at this sample page:

http://www.wizardsplace.com/SEO/h-tags.html

Using correctly coded and placed H1 and H2 (at least) headings throughout your web pages can significantly benefit your search engine results. But also remember: making everything important is the same as making nothing important.