“Welcome” is a wonderful word to use when someone comes to visit your business. It’s a nice word to put on a floor mat. But it’s a terrible word to put at the top of your website’s home page. Or at the top of any page of your website.
Why? Because you’re wasting a chance to gain search engine visibility.
Why Your Heading Text Matters
When a search engine indexes your site for its database, it looks at some very specific elements of your site. Some of these elements carry more weight when the search engine considers how relevant your site’s content is to the keywords someone typed in on the search site.
Headings are one of those important elements. Combined with the page title, descriptions and content, they give the search engine an idea of what your page is about. The more relevant the content in your headings, the better your chances of ranking well in the search results.
Make Your Heading Text Relevant
So while “Welcome” may be a perfectly friendly greeting, it’s most likely not very relevant to your website. Ideally, your heading text should contain the keywords that you’ve selected for your page. So if the page in questions is about pregnancy massage, your heading should be something like “Pregnancy Massage.” If you go into specific aspects of pregnancy massage on the page, every subsequent heading should repeat the keywords and expand on them.
So your page headings might look like this. Notice how the keyword phrase is repeated in each heading and subheading:
Main heading: Pregnancy Massage
Subheadings:
Pregnancy Massage in the First Trimester
Pregnancy Massage in the Second Trimester
Pregnancy Massage in the Third Trimester
Benefits of Pregnancy Massage
Using Heading Tags
Now that you’ve selected relevant keywords for your heading, it’s time to tell the search engine that this line of text is indeed a heading, and not just a short paragraph. You do that by using a specific tag called, not surprisingly, a heading tag. HTML code allows for six levels of headings. In most situations you won’t need to go more than three levels deep.
The most common heading tag is the level 1 heading. To use it you simply enclose your heading text in two H1 tags, like this:
<H1>Pregnancy Massage</H1>
Notice the forward slash in the second H1. This tells the browser it has come to the end of the heading.
Your subheadings would use H2 tags, like this:
<H2>Pregnancy Massage in the First Trimester</H2>
Again, notice the forward slash in the second tag.
Your Turn
Now that you know what words should be in your heading tags, go through the pages on your website. Eliminate space-wasting headings such as “Welcome” and replace them with keyword-rich text. Then make sure your headings are enclosed in H1 or H2 tags. By taking these simple steps you will increase your website’s relevance to the search engine.
