SEO For RapidWeaver: Header Tags
June 18th, 2011Video Transcript
Another method of emphasizing your most important key-terms is by utilizing header tags. Header tags can be used in various ways on a website. They are sometimes used to display the title of a page, like the one you see here, or as the headings for content, similar to what you see here on this site. There are six different header tags in HTML. The most important header tag is said to be the h1 tag.
The situation with header tags in RapidWeaver is this: Currently, there is one H1 tag, and one H2 tag. These are located in the title…and slogan, respectively. The biggest downside to this is that the location of these headers make it kind of difficult for you to customize the header to fit each page. In addition, these headers are identical on every page of your website.
My recommendation is this: If the header tags don’t concern you all that much, then don’t worry about them. If you want to have a good consistent site title or slogan across all pages of your website, then do so. You could attempt to make this title or slogan include some good keywords, and that might be a good idea.
Here is an alternative to creating your own header tags. This method is going to have you not include anything in your title or slogan, which might look a bit strange on some templates, but very normal of some of the other templates.
This method really is optional. If you don’t want to do it, don’t feel that you have to. Not having your header tags as optimized as they can be will not completely ruin your chance at ranking high in search engines. The first thing you are going to do, is turn off the Title and Slogan, by pressing the Setup button, going to the General tab, and unchecking the boxes next to Title and Slogan. Then, in the RapidWeaver edit window, we’re going to create our H1 tag. To do this, type the code exactly as I am doing. Replace the word KEYWORD with your own keyword. Having just one H1 tag per page should suffice.
If you feel it is appropriate to do so, you can add an H2, or even H3 tag to your page the exact same way. So when it is appropriate to do so? The answer to that depends on a few different factors. The H1 tag should contain your most important, or primary keyterm. If your webpage touches upon things related to your other keyterms, then it may make sense to put another keyterm in an H2 tag. The one thing you need to ask yourself when adding these header tags is ‘does this help my visitors better understand my page?’ if the answer is ‘no,’ then you might be better off only including the H1 tag. Adding header tags just for the sake of SEO is not the right way to do it.
June 18th, 2011 at 3:00 pm
Hi – very interesting series SEO tutorials. I’m very new to RW, all very exciting ! I want to optimise a site, and the meta tags description and keywords info in your other tutorials will help me. I done some of this already but need to do this for each page rather than just the home page which is what i’ve done so far. I’ve done other optimisation things ref the publishing of the xml site map to the root folder of the domain folder etc.
From your tutorial, I understood the logic re H1 and H2 as the title and slogan already use these. You say HTML allows up to 6 tags, and suggest that you can type h1, h2 and even h3 in the edit screen. My question is – I want to keep the title and slogan, but could I use your logic and type , tags in the edit screen i.e. not messing about with h1 h2 but jumping over these to h3 etc. Sorry if this is a misunderstanding or a very basic rule I’ve misunderstood. Please be gentle. Thanks
My website is for a friend, my first one and very basic, much too much text etc. http://www.bruce-thornton.info
June 18th, 2011 at 3:33 pm
Yes, you can definitely type in some h3 tags if you’d like. The video suggest that you could do that for the h1 and h2, as you mentioned, but the same thing applies to the remaining headers as well, so feel free to code it yourself.