Headings and Keywords are Essential for good SEO

If you have had your business website up for a while but are still struggling to attract visitors or rank on the first page of any search engine, it is probably time to start looking at your search engine optimization. If you don’t know what SEO is, then it is absolutely time for you to start looking at solutions to get your website moving up the Google ranks.

For those that have just read that first paragraph three times and are still confused, SEO is a term that simply means making sure that your website is laid out in such a way that any search engine reading your site and moving from page to page, will understand what is important to your business.

It sounds so simple, yet a whole industry as sprung up around search engine optimization because it isn’t really all that simple. Search engines are constantly changing the way in which they rank websites and how they pick which websites are the authorities in their niche area.

However, there are a few things that you can do right now that will not only ensure that your website moves up the search engine rankings, but that human visitors to your site will also find the information that they are after.

Headings

Go through every page of your website, pretend that you are just learning the language, have found this website and you are now trying to work out what the website is about. Look at the headings – do they give you a clue? “About Us” is lovely, but it doesn’t actually say anything about who ‘us’ might be. “About Our Team” is better, at least everyone knows there is a team. But what about “About Our Architects”. Isn’t that so much better? With one very simple change you now have an about page that people can easily understand what the page is about, and search engines have the information that your website has a focus on architects.

Of course – that’s just the main heading. Each page should have several subheadings as well. Not only do these help to break up the text to make the information easier to read, but subheadings also say to a search engine that this information is import, not quite as important as the main heading, but certainly more important than the text in the small print. Sticking with the About page, maybe this is where you talk about the company, or maybe this is where you introduce your staff. Normally something like “Mr John Smith” and a few qualifications, then launch into the biography. But what if you had “Mr John Smith – SEO expert for charity groups”. Sure, Mr Smith is able to help any group, and you’ll say that in the bio paragraph, but now your keywords are SEO, Expert and Charity.

Keywords

People often have a vague understanding of what keywords are, but not often on how they are actually used. If you think about the terms you tend to use when you are searching for something online, those would be keywords. It is surprisingly hard to think of what terms people will use to search for your business, but to then take those 10 terms and turn them into natural sounding keywords is even more difficult.

If you are a physical business you will likely want to include your suburb as a keyword, you will also want to include your product or service. If you sell shoes you want to make sure that a tired mum searching “girls school shoes in Boulder” is going to find your store.

However, the biggest mistake that many people trying to work on their own SEO make is to ‘keyword load’ their webpages. Believe it or not, Google, and most search engines, look at how many times you use a word on a page and have an algorithm to detect unnatural keyword saturation. Using a keyword too often can actually harm your rankings. Until a few years ago it was often recommended to add keyword rich alt-text or headers to images, but as search engines are more actively trying to improve their response to those who are sight impaired or have disabilities that utilize text readers, tricks like  this that cause your site to drop in the ranks. https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/114016?hl=en

So, by all means, ensure that your website content is well written for human readers, but also make sure that it is well written for computer algorithms too.