Now, examine the structure of a page. The content on the page will be read by humans and search engine bots. How will you communicate which content on the page is most important? This is done through markup. This is also where my journalism background prepared me for SEO.
The most important element on the page is the headline. In HTML markup, this is denoted by an H1 tag.
<H1> Place headline here</H1>Like a newspaper, the headline is the largest text on the page. It is larger, bolder, and more contrasting to the background, enabling people to read it quickly and gain a summary of the content. Then, the content on the page should be organized into subtopics and displayed in a readable format. People avoid large paragraphs of text, so you can make reading easier by breaking up the content into smaller sections and headings that make it easier to scan. You do this through additional markup.
Subheadings are used to provide content organization and structure, and they are denoted by H2, H3, H4, etc. Links to additional resources are typically blue and sometimes underlined (links should look like links). Using bullet points increases the readability of the document, and bolding important words will grab the reader’s attention. Writing impactful, descriptive sentences as subheadings, paragraph headings, captions, bullet points, and page links engage the readers and allow them to quickly scan the content and locate important information.
For the search engine, they need the markup to inform the context. Without markup, all text appears the same in the code. Using markup shows the search engine which content is the most important, such as headlines, headings, bold text, and more. When you place keywords in the headings using markup, you are showing the search engines the importance of these key concepts.
Here’s the dual purpose of SEO: by making the content easier to read for humans, you are optimizing the content for search engines! See Figure 4.9.
Leave a Reply