Titles and Headings

When the search engines examine your website they want to be able to tell the difference between each page.  If someone searches “prositetonight.com FAQ” they want to be able to give them our frequently asked questions page as the first result, as opposed to our home page – clearly that’s what the searcher wants.

How will search engines know which page is the frequently asked questions page?

You might think that they would know simply because we have the words “frequently asked questions” on that page.  But what if we have those words on other pages of our site also?  For example, we might have “to see our frequently asked questions click this link” or “checkout our blog for answers to some of Website Tonight’s more frequently asked questions”.  Because we use the words all over our site it’s hard for the search engines to determine which page is actually the frequently asked questions page.

H1 Page Titles

To help the search engines understand the difference between the pages on a website professional web designers use a simple code.  This is called an “H one tag”.  To help the search engines understand the difference between the pages on your website you will want to add this code to each page of your website.  Don’t worry, Website Tonight makes it easy, and we are going to show you how.

1. Open Website Tonight.
2. Go to the first page.
3. Click on the content block with the page title in it, so that you are in edit mode.
4. Highlight the page title.
5. Use the drop down in the upper left titled “Heading” and select “Heading 1″ (image below).
6. Click Save.
7. Repeat steps 1 – 6 for each page of your Website Tonight project.
8. Preview and Publish.

This code tells the search engines that this is the title of the page and therefore what this page is about.  If the search engines cannot distinguish between the pages of your site they often respond by only listing the pages that they understand.  That means that you might only have four pages in the search results on Google, Yahoo, Bing, etc even though your website has ten pages.  If you want to increase your websites visibility online then make sure you have proper H1 tags.

H2 and H3 Titles

Just as an H1 tag tells the search engines what a page is about, an H2 tag tells the search engines what a sub section of a web page is about.  Think of it like a book.  If a website were a book then the domain name would be the title of the book.  The chapter titles would be the H1 tags (page titles), and the sections within the chapters would be the H2 tags.  You can even break it down further and have H3 tags, but H1 tags are the most important, followed by H2 tags, and the search engines typically stop paying attention after the H3 tags.

Keyword Stuffing

There are some words that do not mean anything on their own (i.e. it, the, a, and, by, etc).  The search engines do not care about these words.  They skip right over them and move onto your keywords.

Keywords are words that have a meaning on their own (i.e. cheese, run, best, website, contest, etc).  Make sure that your title tags do not contain more than 6 keywords.  Having more than 6 keywords is referred to as keyword stuffing and is considered a mild form of cheating by the search engines.  If your title has more than six keywords then the search engines will ignore the extra words and they may even lower that pages rank because of it.

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