Latest Posts | SEO, it’s all in a name

What are you searching for?
For a florist in carterton type Florist Carterton

SEO, it’s all in a name

Categories : Latest Posts | News | Web Design |

Search on the Internet for information on Search Engine Optimisation and sooner rather than later you will come across many articles talking about the importance of the filenames, <TITLE> and <H1> html tags.

In this article we will discuss what these are and why they are important.

How SEO and Google works

On the basis Google has found your website for indexing, it uses an automated process to decide what terms are important and relevant to the webpage, and uses this and other factors to decide where it should appear in its search results. This is called the Google PageRank Algorithm.

Where you make changes to your web pages to make them rank better on Google it is called on-page SEO. This is because the changes you make are physically in the HTML of the web page.

One place Google looks to see what your page is about is the titles you use. It is likely if your page is about cars, the page may have references to this in certain places. This is not to say if you do not have these terms in places Google expects to see them, your website will not get indexed, but Google may not see the page as being as important as it should.

Below we explore the common areas where Google looks.

Filename

Domain, path and filename are all important ranking factors, where we can easily change copy on the page, once a filename has been created its permanent. Google knows this and therefore give good weight to the relevance of a filename to the contents of a website page. For instance if we had a webpage about black dogs, a good website page filenames would be: – http://www.mypets.co.uk/dogs/black-dog.html

By giving the website page this name Google knows that the domain is likely to do with animals or pets, it’s in a directory to do with dogs and the webpage is about black dogs. But if the copy on the page does not match up, then Google may not clearly see what is important about the page.

<TITLE> tag

In the <HEAD> section of a web page we can set the <TITLE> tag. This tag is used to describe the title of the web page and it is displayed at the top of the menu bar of the web browser. Again if this is relevant to the filename and topic of the page Google knows that the page is more likely to be about the topic and will rank the page better.

<H1> tag

<H1> is 1 of 6 H tags, each in HTML represent a Heading, with <H1> being the most important, as with all actual content, these tags must be used within the <BODY> tag of a HTML page.

Following standard HTML guidelines an <H1> tag is expected to appear as the first tag after the <BODY> tag appear once and represent the contents of the page. If the <H1> tag does not appear at the top of a page or appears more than once, it will not cause display problems, but Google may not apply as much weight to the page as if the guidelines had been followed.

By making sure the above 3 guidelines are followed you should start to see an improvement in the ranking of your website on any search engine.

This article was written by Mark Excell of Websites by Mark