Basic SEO: What Search Engines Love - SEO Guide continued
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Headers in HTML (<H1>, <H2>, etc.) are a great way to tell search engines what keywords are important. Search engines in turn weigh them more heavily than keywords in body text. However, <H> tags often cause design issues when displayed in the browser. Because of this, designers have started to use Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) to design their headers. Before you even ask, there is a way to get the best of both worlds. You can do this by defining the style for a particular HTML tag, which in this case would be the <H> tag. Check out the following example:
H1 {
font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;
font-size: 16px;
font-weight: bold;
color: #ff3333
}
Now, the browser will read this style whenever it sees an <H1> tag on your page.
You can also format certain words (keywords) within the text of a page to inform the search engine that they are more important than the rest of the text. These techniques are easy to use and fairly obvious. They include making the text bold or italic, putting keywords in a bulleted list, or using title case (first letter in each word is upper case).
Links are another vitally important tool when it comes to SEO. They not only help searchbots find the other pages within your site, they also tell the search engine about the pages with the link and the page being linked to. Make sure all the pages in your site link to and from each other. Also, create them using the same keywords you used in your TITLE tags. Do not use one that says Click Here, or something similar. This only refers to links to and from pages within your site. For more information about links to and from other sites, check out the articles in SEO Chat.
If you are making a site for a local business, you'll want to include your full address (street, city, state, zip code) in some way. Put it somewhere near the top of the page, including your TITLE and DESCRIPTION meta tags, and mention the city and zip code at least once in your body text.
These are just a few of the basic things that search engines love. So keep them in mind when you design your site. Stay tuned for my next article, which will discuss what search engines hate. Think of it as the yang to this article's yin.
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