Heading tags are a very important element in creating and maintaining a search engine friendly web site or blog. In this some what short but descriptive article, I am going to explain to you what heading tags are and how they can be used on your website for improving your site SEO.

A heading tag defines headers. A header is used to mark sections on your blog or web site. There are six header levels. These levels are as follows: H1, H2, H3, H4, H5, H6. The H1 header tag is the largest font size and H6 is the smallest.

Search engines look for header tags because they are beacons for finding content as well as pathways on your blog or web site. The three most commonly used header tags are: H1, H2, and H3. Sometimes, H4 is used, but not too often. H5 and H6 are rarely used.

Here is an example of how I use Header tags on my blogs.

In the source code of my blogs, the H1 tag is the link to my home page. The H2 tags represent my categories, and H3 represent my post and page titles. From there, my WordPress Tags are made as STRONG, or otherwise called BOLD. Excuse my lack of being an artist, but here is a screen shot:

The home page of my blog feeds H2 links to my category sections. From there, my category sections feed h3 links to my blog posts. My blog post then feed BOLD links into my tags. Electricity always takes the path of least resistance. With search engine optimization, web crawlers follow the same rules. Web web site building, or in my case, blog building, I paved the path for web crawlers. I build the path of least resistance.

On the home page of my blogs, as you know, H2 links feed to my category pages. However, as you know, my most recent blogs posts still appear on my home page. These will remain H3 links. When web crawlers see this, they place emphisis on my category sections to find the content.

That is one of the reasons why I believe that I can pump out so much content and have it all index so quickly. Granted, nothing I say or do is proven. That is where many SEOs differ. I am just telling you precisely what I do and it works.

When you build these pathways for web crawlers, really in many ways you are building multiple HomePages to your site or blog. In fact, there are many situations where a category section of one of my blogs has more PageRank and power than its own home page and the same goes with a tag section too.

If I have a blog that has three categories: Dogs, Cats and Humans. And I write a post about Dogs. It is very likely that that post will get indexed because the crawler found it on the category section rather than the home page.

Using proper heading tags to shape and mold how I want web crawlers to perceive my sections of my blog is very important. Of course, getting an sitemap xml on your blog is extermely helpful too. Everything in SEO compliments each other. In order to have a site optimized for search engines, you should understand that there isn’t just ONE SUPER HUGE thing you need to do. Instead, there are many smaller things to do that add up towards the big picture of doing SEO on a site.

What did I miss? How else can you better optimize your web site or blog for search engines? Drop me a comment and share your thoughts.

So many people are concerned with how well their sites and pages rank in the search engines. Time and time again, I get questions sent to me via email and instant message asking the same thing. “Garry, can you please take a look at my site and tell me if it is search engine friendly?” or, “Garry, how come my site doesn’t rank for the keywords I want?” or, “Garry, where do I start with learning more about search engine optimization?”

With the obvious demand for a better understanding of search engines, how to rank in them and how to market your content in them, here is a search engine checklist that I believe you’ll find helpful. It is a simple Yes/No checklist. The more questions that you can answer yes, the more you’re on your way to search engine traffic bliss! Drop a comment with your scores if you’d like.

Simple Search Engine Checklist:

1. Are you creating content that your readers are interested in?
2. Does your content contain focused keyword phrases?
3. Are you optimizing your pages with three to five keyword phrases?
4. Do most of your important keywords appear above the top fold?
5. Are your keywords hyperlinked?
6. Do your graphics on your post contain focused and relevant keywords?
7. Does your post title contain focused keywords?
8. Does your post URL contain focused keywords?
9. Can search engines and people easily find your content from the home page?
10. Do people link back to your home page and individual pages?
11. Are you using basic HTML coding (e.g. H1, h2, h3, Bold, Alt text, etc.)

If you can answer “Yes” to all these questions then you should have a healthy site for users as well as search engines. Feel free to drop a comment and also I’d love it if you’d share this post with your readers on your own site as it can do nothing but help.

I have to consider that there are many people who don’t know what a robots.txt file is. In this article I am going to explain what a robots.txt file is, how to use it and why it is important. I am sure that there are many have heard about a robots.txt file is but might not know exactly what does it do and how will it benefit you? So let’s see if we can answer a few questions for you regarding the in’s and out’s of a robots.txt file.

The Simple Explanation

A robots.txt is a very small file that resides on your server that gives specific instructions to webcrawlers such as the famous Googlebot on which directories and files are allowed to be crawled and indexed. It is important to use a robots.txt file because it puts you (the publisher/webmaster) in total control of where webcrawlers are allow to visit on your website. A more detailed explanation can be found here on Wikipedia, at www.robotstxt.org, and here at Matt Cutt’s blog.

How Is It Useful?

Using a robots.txt file is useful (especially for WordPress users) because it gives you the ability to say where webcrawlers are allowed or NOT allowed to visit. By drawing this map for webcrawlers you do two things:

1. You help the webcrawler by not allowing it to index crazy and stupid things such as files in your wp-includes directory.
2. You help your important content get indexed the way you want it to and prevent duplicate content from getting indexed, such as disallowing your archives, category or tags section.

Every blog is unique and every author such as yourself, stress a unique importance on the various sections within a blog. It is up to you to decide which sections on your blog as well as within your server that you want to grant or deny access to webcrawlers. I have some blogs where I disallow all access except for the homepage and the individual post pages. Other blogs, I don’t care and put total faith into webcrawlers to crawl everything and index and rank things according to their importance.

How Do You Implement It?

If you are a WordPress blogger, your blog already has a robots.txt built in. By default, the files is set to allow access to all directories on your server. The process of overriding the default is easy. Simply create a txt file using NotePad, WordPad, TextPad, etc.. and name it robots.txt. From there, visit this page to learn about how you can quickly start adding instructions to it.

What Sections Will You Allow or Disallow?

Now that you know about the Robots.txt file, which section on your WordPress blog are you going to allow/disallow? If you already use a robots.txt file, I want to invite you to share you input by dropping a comment. I’d like to know what has been most effective for your blog. I look forward to reading your comments. Also, if you should have any questions, feel free to ask I’ll be standing by. Also, I am sure that many of my readers will be happy to pitch in and help address your questions too.