Killer Header Tags for the Search Engines Effectiveness

Unless you’re a web designer, you might not even know what a header tag is. And you may not know how important they are to your search engine effectiveness. But they do count and you should get to know their purpose and how to use them if you plan on getting visitors from the search engines. The header tags are hidden in the HTML at the top of web pages, essentially invisible to visitors.

When a visitor is on a on a search engine, they type in a keyword phrase and then hit “search”. They end up on a search engine results pages (SERP). If you’re fortunate to have your listing show up in the results, the next hurdle is to get someone to actually click on your listing. You need to convert people from this page, and one way to do this is to have well crafted Title tags and META Descriptions. From here on out we’ll talk about what these header tags do.

Title Tag

The most important header tag is the “title” tag. It tells the search engines what the theme of your site is. It’s important to have your key phrases in the title tag. Put your keyword phrases toward the front of the title tag along with the name of your company. You should shoot for 65 characters or less, including spaces. This phrase is visible at the top of web pages in the blue bar within Internet Explorer.

We were working on an ecommerce site for a client that had about 700 products. We switched around the Title tag so the product name was in front of the manufacturer because more people searched on the product name. The client saw a tremendous increase in organic traffic. This strategy, in combination with pay per click advertising and email marketing changes, helped the client go from $225K per month in sales to over $600K per month.

META Description

The META Description is displayed in the SERPs. If you don’t have the META Description, then the search engines use the text that is on your page and you can’t control what it says. It looks like a jumbled mess and you are less likely to be clicked on.

If the META Description is well written and the others on the page aren’t, then your listing is more likely to be clicked on. Shoot for 154 characters, including spaces, and write the description in meaningful sentences. You should also include keywords in your description because it aids in helping your rankings.

META Keywords

In the search engine’s infancy back in the mid-1990s, it was important to include the META Keywords. The value of META tag has diminished over the years and most search engines now ignore it.

According to Danny Sullivan, Partner and Chief Content Officer of Third Door Media, makes this observation about META Keywords: “The meta keyword tag is also sometimes useful as a way to help your page come up for synonyms or unusual words that don't appear on the page itself. For instance, let's say you had a page all about the ‘Penny Black’ stamp. You never actually say the word ‘collecting’ on this page. By having the word in your meta keywords tag, then you may help increase the odds of coming up if someone searched for ‘penny black stamp collecting.’ Of course you would greater increase the odds if you just used the word "collecting" in the body copy of the page itself.”

Conclusion

Having good keyword infusion within your Title tag, META Description and META Keywords is essential to have good search engine results. Implementing them correctly will go along way to seeing more visitors come to your site as a result of showing up in the search engine rankings.

Dave Carlson owns Green Chair Marketing Group, an Internet marketing firm in Denver, Colo., specializing in driving visitors to web sites by search engine optimization, pay per click advertising, and web site design/redesign. Call 720-922-3124 or visit his web site at http://www.GreenChair.net