« Firm Announces Driving More than Seven Million Visitors from the Search Engines to Edmunds.com! | Meta Tags: Your Questions Answered »
October 15, 2001
TIP: How to Make Better Use of Heading Tags
Here's one of the powerful search engine positioning tips found in this month's WebPosition Gold Knowledge Base update:
Some search engines will give words found in the "H1" tag a boost in relevancy. The H1 tag is used to specify page or topic headings. The problem with the tag is that it's often too big and ugly to use very much. In most browsers H1 is an oversized font that often looks out of place on a page.
The good news is that there is a clever way you can get the best of both worlds by using Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). With CSS, you can specify that the browser display the H1 tag or other tags on your page anyway you please. This is great since you can get both a boost in relevancy and get better control of your page's appearance in one easy step. How?
In the <HEAD> area of the page, put the following STYLE lines:
<STYLE TYPE="text/css">
H1 {font-family: arial,helvetica; font-size: 12pt; color: black}
</STYLE>
The above will force all H1 tags on the page to use a 12 pt Arial or Helvetica font in black text. You can adjust the point size or font to whatever values look best on your page.
By using this CSS tag, you are free to use the H1 tag on ALL your pages to gain extra relevancy WITHOUT sacrificing the look of your pages. Since many engines give more weight to keywords that appear within H1 heading tags versus the regular body text, this is one tip you'll definitely want to implement today!
You'll find more powerful tips like this one in WebPosition's Page Critic.
For more information on Cascading Style Sheets and other ways you can use them to customize the look of your page, see:
← What is this?
