Are you sure you are ready for SEO 201? We are going to presume that you have read and completely comprehend SEO in General and SEO 101. If you passed the other classes it’s time to learn more.

In this class, since you are now well-versed in applying your title and meta tags, you are going to learn about “heading” tags. A heading tag is any tag that begins with the “h”, such as the <h1></h1>, <h2></h2> and so on. In addition to causing the text in between those tags to change in size and weight (i.e. h1 about 20pt. text/bold; h2 about 18pt. text/bold; etc. some of which varies with different browsers), the search engines compare your use of these tags to your copy. The ‘weight’ that the search engines put on them is in the order of h1 being the most relevant keyword/phrase to the page down to h6 being the least relevant. If you fail to use these tags you are missing an important part of your optimization.

Visitors to your Web site are no different than you. You don’t want to wade through a lot of copy/text…like we have in our “classes”. It’s acceptable in our “classes” because you here to get a lot of information…and there is no way to learn this ‘stuff’ without being long-winded. That said, break up your copy with headings. Write some copy, a few sentences, then break up the paragraphs with a new heading that describes the next section. That heading is where you will use the heading tag. Let’s first examine the various heading tags.

This is the default h1 heading.

The h2 default heading is obviously smaller.

Notice how h3 default is even smaller.

The h4 default is closest to the size of your copy, but bold.

The h5 default is all caps, even if your text is not, and italics.

The h6 default may mandate a magnifying glass to read!

Each of the above heading tags was created as they were designed to be seen. Any variations in their default settings is purely the result of your specific browser reading them. Notice how each uses bold type font and each is on a separate line. There are no breaks used in the above examples. Each heading tag mandates its own line and forces anything outside the ending tag to the next line of text. You should also see that the h5 tag uses a default italic type font.

Your first heading should be the most important heading of your page. That heading will also contain your most important keyword(s)/phrase(s). In keeping with our SEO 101 scenario, we’ll use Joe’s Pizza Joint also here. Our savvy Joe has his first heading “Joe’s Pizza and Party Joint”. You may question why Joe would select that for his most important heading. I don’t know…you’ll have to ask Joe. Every class has a class-clown…sorry. Back to work. Joe knows that the page is about pizza and he knows that people search for places to have a party. Since Joe is trying to solicit business for pizza parties, and many people will search something like “pizza party” or “pizza joint”, Joe chose to use the heading to attract search engines, since his business is all about pizza and he wants the search engines to know that, and, searches potential visitors perform in the search engine will be highly likely to include pizza and party in the search. So, it stands to reason that Joe wants his most important heading surrounded by the most important heading tag, the <h1>Joe’s Pizza and Party Joint</h1> so that the search engines see that Joe is telling them this heading is really, really important. Bear in mind that Joe’s copy better be very relevant to that heading or the search engines will not be happy.

Now, when you use the heading tags you will find that the text may not, and usually will not be just the way you want the heading to look. It may be too big, or take up too much room on your page. Relax. CSS to the rescue! We have classes on CSS too so you won’t get a lot of help in this class for CSS, but we’re going to touch on the subject for this particular issue. Do this, <h1 class=”firsthead”></h1>. That heading tag can now be manipulated in your CSS so that it will be whatever color, size, font, or anything else you want to change about the look and margins. You should know that a heading tag, by default, will take up an entire line. So, if you have only a couple of words in the heading tag followed by other copy, the other copy will break to the next line. You can change this within the CSS that you use for the heading tag. Again, review our CSS classes to see how. Now back to Joe…

The second heading Joe uses ‘should’ use the h2 tag. As previously discussed, there is a hierarchy for the heading tags. h1 is first and most important followed by h2 and so on. You ‘could’ put the h1 at the bottom of the page, start with an h6 and then go to an h3, then back to h2, or put them in any order you want. But, if you do not follow the correct hierarchy the search engines will find your page less relevant. Why? Because ‘you’ told the search engine that your most important keyword, the one using the h1 tag is all the way at the bottom of the page and…well, the word/phrase just isn’t that important if it’s all the way down there. If you put the h1 around something at the bottom of the page you are lowering the relevance of your page.

• Start at the top with h1 and work your way down your page.
• Do you have to use all of the heading tag numbers? No.
• Do you have to use only one of each? No.
• If you use more than one h1 tag your page will become less relevant.
• If you use more than one h4 or h5 or h6 tag, it’s of no consequence because you already told the search engine that what is contained in that tag is not that relevant.

Joe has now created his copy for his home page, used the title tag, meta tags, heading tags, what else could possibly be important? This is so easy that even “I” could create a page to take a top 10 position in Google.

Really?! There’s a reason you have a job doing what ‘you’ do and professional search engine optimization experts charge a fortune! You’ve read through 3 classes of instructions and you know…only basic information about optimization. Why? Because there remains:

• How much copy do you use for each keyword/phrase?
• Where should the keyword(s)/phrase(s) appear in the sentences?
• Why?
• How many lines from the top of the page (in source view) should there be before my copy begins?
• How do I know what keyword(s)/phrase(s) to use? (very important)
• What is “keyword density”? (that’s a big one too)
• How long should the title be for each page?
• How many words should be in the description meta tag?
• How many keyword(s)/phrase(s) should be in the keywords meta tag?
• What about links to or from my site? Should I use a “link farm”?
• Will using one of those programs to build out-bound links help my ranking?
• Why can’t I simply use a “cloaked” page instead of going through all this optimization?
• What the heck is a “cloaked” page?!!
• How many results in a specific search should I expect to be able with which to compete? Can I compete in a search that has more than 10 million results?
• When will my page be listed?
• How do I know “if” my page will be listed in the search engines?
• How long do I have to wait for the search engines to re-asses my page after I make changes? Or, how often do the search engine ‘bots’ visit?
• How many people search the keyword(s)/phrase(s) I targeted?

If you think those are the only questions left, think again…

A great deal of what a competent seo professional provides is thinking. He/she thinks of all the “what if’s” in order to address the plethora of variables and outcomes from coding something and how it relates to what might be searched, and the ever important question, “how ‘relevant’ is the page to the subject?” must be kept in mind and asked throughout every step of the process. It’s not enough to be “visually” relevant. In order for the search engines to decide ‘if’ your page is relevant your page must be coded as relevant. Coding includes the copy of the page. Think of seo this way. Search engines are blind. How are you going to prove to the search engines that ‘your’ page is more relevant than your competition?

A competent, professional, experienced search engine optimization expert is the only person who can “effectively” and unequivocally answer all of the above questions. A person of this stature has learned from trial and error – not some classroom in college, a technical school or specialized training school. Why? Because there isn’t one! No school teaches what you need to know about seo in order to truly be successful. Try this. Go to Google and search (without the quotes)  “city directories online”. You will have about 260,000,000 (at the time of this writing…it changes – that’s two hundred sixty “million”) results. Look at position 6. That site, City Directory On Line, was brought live on line in March of 2008. It’s a database driven site, or technically a “dynamic” site, and still has been optimized and attained a top 10 position in less than a year.

Only through experience will you be able to optimize a Web site like that and it will take years of practice. A professional seo expert will have as much or more research, experience, and instruction for his/her field of expertise than most physicians or lawyers. Placing a Web site in a top 10 position within so many search results would cost at least $15,000. Just to confuse you more, the above example was current as of January 31, 2009. As an seo expert I constantly look for ‘better’ positioning and ‘better’ keyword(s)/phrase(s) to target. There is the possibility that in February or March the site will appear higher in another, more “relevant” search because there are more searches done for the updated keyword(s)/phrase(s).

Would you like to move on to the next class? Ok. Here’s the test for SEO 201. What would be found in Joe’s h2 heading?