Posted on Tuesday 20th of November 2007 at 09:34 in SEO

How to SEO your site: Episode 2 - Marking up your content

Welcome to the second in my series of "how to SEO your site". If this is your first visit I recommend you look over episode 1 which discussed how to SEO your templates. This article is focused on how you should mark up your website content.

In episode one I mused that many bloggers spend hours deliberating how to mark up the content for maximum SEO effectiveness without even checking their templates for crucial elements like H1 tags. So it's similarly possible that many users (myself included) don't actually mark up our content effectively (for whatever reason), thus undoing the good work you've done at a template level. So let's look at how you should do things.

Use heading tags properly
You should be using h2, h3, h4 and h5 within your content to mark up your headers (NOT strong/bold tags like I use). Search engines pay a lot of attention to heading tags, so it's worth spending the extra time putting them into your content. It's important to ensure that you're using the right keywords in your header tags too; it's pointless taking the extra time to correctly SEO your content structure without SEO'ing the content too. Filling headers and titles with words that no one is ever likely to search for is not a good idea; instead get a feel for what keywords people actually use and write your headers around them.

Use 'strong' markup properly (unlike me)
Search engines also look at words you're adding emphasis to and the strong tag is no different. Therefore it doesn't hurt to bolden up important words or phrases; how much weight is placed on them is questionable but it's worth doing if it helps you make a point.

Links
As I said above, search engines care about keywords you emphasise and words wrapped in links are no different. If you can help it you should avoid links like click here or my post because there is no useful search-friendly content associated with them. Let me give you an example: I run a website selling shoes, which statement is a search engine going to like more?

Click here to buy Italian shoes OR Click here to buy Italian shoes? Don't forget your search engine reputation is derived largely from who you link to and who links back - so it's best to add more weight to the link by providing meaningful text.

Images
If you must use images ensure that any content contained within that image is available through the ALT attribute of the image. This is not only good for accessibility but Google cares about that content; if you've got a website selling shoes you're going to be more reputable if you have images of shoes too. The only way to tell search engines that you have photos of shoes is by having meaningful ALT text and TITLE attributes.

I don't do this properly...
A quick browse of the source code from Seopher.com shows that the content itself is actually not very SEO friendly. I really only use H2 tags within the content and my headers are all STRONG tags, rather than H# like they should be. Because of the custom editor I built for the back-end I'm limited to using line-breaks rather than correct paragraph markup... I'm going to start SEO'ing my content once I've finished this series of articles.

Anyway, hopefully this fairly basic advice is useful to someone other than myself. I too shall be following this advice when I find the time to do so. In episode three I'm going to be discussing keyword density and a number of other ways you can make your content more effective.

 

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