Optimizing Your HTML Tags for Search Engines - Part 1

Let me start off by saying that optimizing your HTML tags for Search Engines is almost entirely different then optimizing your site for readers. The reason I say almost entirely different, is that, how a Search Engine searches your site is very similar as to how a user with a screen reader would see or use your site. For now, I will be talking about taking steps towards Search Engine Optimization.

Please note that whenever I mention something is good for Google, it’s all hypothetical. People on the web have a good idea about how Google’s Search Engines work, but there aren’t that many people out there that know how Google’s Search Engine works.

Your H1 Tag and Title Tag

I can say, and many people can agree, that these are the two most important tags for a Search Engine. If you’re above using H1 tags because they remind you of the early 90’s, you need to understand that how well your site hits on a Search Engine is more important then whatever pride you aren’t willing to swallow.

That being said, thought needs to be put into your H1 and Title tags. If these are the most important tags, why wouldn’t you want to put thought in them? You need to take a step back and understand what keywords and what market you want to hit. Let’s use WordPress as an example. Setting up your WordPress blog with the name being: “Webmaster’s Forum Blog” and spamming that throughout your site’s Title and H1 tags, in my opinion, isn’t a very good use of these two. Why not? What are the chances someone is looking for something as generic as your title in Google? In my opinion, it’s ultra low compared to the rich keywords you could be using. Note: Please keep in mind, less is more, having a title with quotation marks or other decoration things don’t really help much doesn’t help, and neither does having a title spam 3 screen lengths.

This is where Search Engine Optimization (SEO for short) comes into play. Here are two examples:

SEO Example 1

By default, your WordPress blog’s title contains whatever you said your “weblog” title to be when you first set up WordPress. So my main page and subpage had a title and h1 similar to “A Blog for Web People” on every page. (What happens is, by default, the big white text in the big blue box when you first create a blog is your h1 and title).

When you think about it “A Blog for Web People” appearing on every single page as my title AND using my h1 tag? That’s terrible, not only would it be terribly hard to rank for those generic keywords, but who would type those words in Google’s Search Engine? What I need to do is get that terrible use of words out of my valuable tags, and get some good keywords in there.
For the title:

• Left the front page title relatively similar to the default. Added some keywords to spice things up. I really don’t care if someone types in pat-burt or pat burt in a Search Engine anyway, that shouldn’t take up Title real estate. The title should still give a good idea where someone is though.
• Set all single WordPress blog pages’ titles to ONLY whatever the title of the blog post is. (Instead of the title being the default “A Blog for Web People > Title of Blog Here”)

For the h1:

• Set all the blog post titles as the H1 tag on the front page (titles are the biggest keyword loaded asset I have)
• Set each blog post title as the H1 tag when a blog post is being displayed individually

SEO Example 2

A blog is set up with advice on how to get a girlfriend. When the WordPress blog was created, the weblog title was set to “Getting a Girlfriend”. By default, WordPress put this across my Titles and H1 tags. This, THIS is a great example of a good way to use similar Title and H1 tags. I can see this site hitting tons of searches daily made by hormone-enraged 13 year olds typing “how do i get a girlfriend” “tips on getting a girlfriend” in Google and having that blog show up.

What you also need to keep in mind, is you want some variety. You also want to attack some keywords such as “How to Dress” to further help reach your target demographic and to help you rank higher on some other keywords.

For the title:

• Left the title “Getting a girlfriend” intact on the front page. Looks great in your bookmarks, explains the site, and uses your main pages Title tag efficiently.
• Set the title for all single WordPress blog post pages to “Getting a girlfriend - POST NAME” This keeps the title fairly short, and makes use of this tags importance.

For the h1:

• Left the h1 as “Getting a girlfriend”. Made use of h2 to tag all the WordPress blog post titles on the front page.
• Set the h1 as the Post Name onall the individual WordPres blog post pages

That’s all for Part 1, Part 2 will contain more information on content and directory structures.

For reference, here’s Part 2 of Optimizing Your HTML Tags for Search Engines.

Related Posts

• Search Engine Optimization for WordPress - Part 3
• Optimizing Your HTML Tags for Search Engines - Part 2
• Search Engine Optimization for WordPress - Part 1