The body text & HTML headings H1 – H6

The body text

The main textual content that is placed within the body tag and is visible to your visitors is an important strategic field for keyword scattering.

Remember the importance of keyword prominence and place your keyword phrase early in the body text of the page. This may also become a means to communicate your message to prospects; some search engines retrieve the first few lines of your Web page and use them as the description of your site in the search results. So, put a number of important keywords in the first few lines in the visible part of your body text. Try to tailor the text in the beginning so that it can be used as a description of your site.

Spread your keyword phrases throughout the body of the page in natural sounding paragraphs; try to keep separate words of your key phrases close together for proximity sake. Put a secondary key phrase in the middle and at the end of your body text. Have some of your keywords in bold (for this purpose, it’s better to use the “<b>” tag instead of styles of logical <strong> formatting. However, you can still apply the necessary styles to this text by the following trick: <b style=”font-weight:bold”>).

Remember your content minimum for a page is 125 words but it’s better to reach far beyond this limit.

HTML headings h1 – h6

The headings themselves are a good means of visually organizing your content. Besides that, search engines consider the headings and sub-headings of your page, (especially those in bold), to be important. Take advantage of this by using H1, H2 and H3 tags instead of graphical headings, especially towards the top of your page.

Use heading tags to break up your page copy and make it easier to read and absorb for your visitors. Include your most important search keywords and phrases within the heading text. It follows that using your target keywords and phrases within these headings means that search engines will give them more relevancy weight. Thus, you should always try to use your target keywords within the headings and sub-headings to break up the text on your page.

Page Heading incorporating most important keyword phrase

Sub-Heading 1 incorporating most important keyword phrase

Paragraph of text incorporating other target keyword phrases

Sub-Heading 2 incorporating next most important keyword phrase

Paragraph of text incorporating other target keyword phrases

And so on…

The problem about headings is that each type of browser has its own way of displaying them and thus may not match your design ideas. You may apply the following workaround with the help of the style attribute:

<h1 style=”font-size:10px;color:#00FFFF;font-weight:bold”>This is the formatted heading</h1>

Or with the class attribute, provided the class is defined somewhere in a style sheet.

The search engine will see a first level heading here, but the browser will show human visitors the text formatted as you need instead of standard level one heading.

What should be avoided is trying to repeat the first level tag more than one time. In other words, you shouldn’t have more than one <h1> tag on your page to indicate that your main topic is streamlined around a single definite concept.

As for the tags of other levels, it is up to you to use multiple,tags etc. on a page in order to structure information in a proper way. Just do your best not to overuse them, and keep to the quality content guidelines.