The structure of your website is very important for maintaining good search engine positions. Headings are quite possibly one of the most important elements in maintaining a good structure to your web pages, they can convey meaning and represent the base on which the rest of your copy sits.

Headings are helpful to all of your visitors. Your human visitors will be grateful for the use of headings as headings help break up the text, making it easier to ‘skim read’. If your visitors also use screen reading equipment then they will find well-structured headings even more useful as headings can be tabbed between giving blind or partially sighted visitors the opportunity to ‘skim read’ just like everyone else. Your robotic friends, the search engine spiders, also rely on good html structure, and headings offer them a real clue as to what your page is all about.

Heading Tag Ordering

The order in which you place your heading tags is very important to maintaining a suitable, usable structure to your web pages. The first thing to remember is to place your heading tags in descending order, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6. The h1 being the most important heading on your page, should be closely related to your page title, and contain your most important keywords. There should only ever be one h1 on each page. The rest of the heading tags are subheadings, and should be treated as such, being thematically linked to the headings above and support the main, h1.

You don’t have to order your headings in h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6 all the time. This may seem like a contradiction to what I said above, and I suppose it is a bit, but let me explain with diagrams:

So you can have an h3 under an h2, then you can go back to another h2, then place another h3 underneath it. What you must never do is skip headings. By this I mean, h1, h3, h2 – this isn’t logical.

Heading Tag Content

In the paragraph above I touched on the fact that your heading tags should contain your keywords. If you have planned your SEO campaign well, then your keywords should naturally fit into your web pages without too much ‘shoe-horning’ – in fact I’d go so far as to say that if you can’t get your keywords to work naturally then you should go back to the planning stage and work out a better list of keywords because you’ve probably chosen the wrong ones.

I would like to take this opportunity to tell you not to stuff your headings with keywords. Keyword stuffing doesn’t make much sense to your human visitors, so in my opinion is a pretty useless exercise, especially when your think of the search engines’ goal – to provide a list of useful websites for the search query. Instead, you should make sure your heading tags are grammatically correct, read well, and entice your readers to read the paragraph they head up.

Heading Tags Summarised

1. Every page within your site should have at least one heading
2. You should only ever put one h1 on a page
3. Make sure your h1 is the first heading on the page
4. Your h1 should contain your main keyword and be similar but not the same as the page title
5. Style your headings with CSS, not inline styles
6. Never skip heading levels. It isn’t logical to skip from h2 to h4. However, you can go from h2 to h3, then back to h2 if your content warrants this
7. You can use more than one h2, h3, h4, h5, and h6 on your page
8. All headings apart from h1 are subheadings
9. You should use your headings consistently throughout your website
10. Headings should be grammatically correct, logical and easy to scan
11. Put your keywords in if you can, if you can’t then go back to the drawing board…
12. Your headings should be closely related to your text

If structuring your headings was all you did to your website then you would be doing yourself a massive favour! I’ve seen sites shoot up the listings just by incorporating changes to the headings. If you have any questions or comments about headings then don’t be shy – comment!

There are many places online people can go to find information about a whole range of subjects they are interested in. With this in mind, there are intense levels of competition and pressure to ensure that your content is original.

For people who stumble upon your writing; whether it is through a blog, article, a press release or integrated into your web design, your writing needs to be new to gain the interest of your target audience.

So where do people find inspiration for fresh content?

Well, the Internet changes every single day and as more ambitious subjects are being developed, the most useful way to gain new knowledge and fresh content is through planning and research.

Many people choose to add new information to their web site for Search Engine Optimisation purposes and often forget that it also has to be informative and relevant to their audience.

One modern example that has occurred in recent years are social media sites such as Twitter and Facebook. Since these sites have taken off, many people are looking for ways to use these sites to their advantage. Because of the demand of information wanted by social media users, many people have provided articles and press releases based around this phenomenon alone.

With the amount of expansion that occurs online there is a vast amount of knowledge that people express through online marketing. The secret to fresh content is to look at what has been written previously, and the format and style it has been attempted to be expressed.

One aspect that writers face is the worry of repetition in their writing. However, all content is a rewrite of previous work so it is important to find a different angle and express it in your own individual style.

Reading, research and re-write are the keys to original content and can make inspiration come together to create pieces of writing that stand out from the rest.

For best results in SEO you must start with a cleanly coded website. The search engine spiders will find it easier to crawl and index your site if the code is clean.

There are other benefits of validating your code, these include:

• Cross browser compatibility
• Increased accessibility
• Faster loading times

You will probably find your site will start to climb the rankings once you ensure the site complies with the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) web standards. It is important to check each page validates, and every new page you add to your website should be checked.

Validate your code

Use the W3C HTML validator to check your HTML code. The vaildator will give you prompts to help you fix any bugs it finds.

Use the W3C CSS validator to check your CSS. Again, the validator will help you fix any problems it finds.

By making sure your site validates for both HTML and CSS you are ‘future-proofing’ your site, ensuring long term success.

I often wonder at the marketing skills of technical optimisers and do we (the optimisers) get caught up too heavily the listing and not look at a customers site objectively enough? Within the Creare SEO department we implement all sorts of techniques to ensure all aspects are addressed and i believe that some people are naturally better at this than others.

I also believe that PPC click campaigns allows optimisers to take and step back and look at such important factors in terms of conversion rate and making sure that the site provides the user experience required. At Creare any issues regarding this are minimised and this is why;

Creare specialise  in marketing, web design and SEO which means that we have the required skill sets to offer a fantastic service for all out customers whatever your industry.