Page Titles & Heads: Web Page Optimization Tactics

Writing by Nick Stamoulis on Saturday, 20 of October , 2007 at 1:05 pm

First, let’s define the difference between a page title and a headline. Your page title is not actually on your web page anywhere. If you look at the top of your browser, in the left top corner, you’ll see a string of words. That’s your page title. It is generated in the meta tags section of your page code, which is visible to search engines and browsers but invisible to humans (unless they View Source).

Your web page headline, on the other hand, is visible on your web page. There are two types of headlines - main headlines and subheadlines, or subheads for short. Some people call subheads “section headings.” It matters not what you call it as long as you know what you are talking about.

Page Title Optimization
To optimize your page title, you need to do two things. The first thing is you need to make sure that you use your keyword in the title. You also need to make sure that your keyword is placed as close to the beginning of your title as possible. In other words, of the two page titles below, Page Title A is better than Page Title B:

Page Title A
Page Titles: How To Optimize Them

Page Title B
You Can Optimize Your Page Titles

Headline Optimization
Optimizing your headline is a little more tricky than optimizing your page title. All you really have to do for your page title is stick it between the TITLE and /TITLE brackets. But for headlines you have to know and use some HTML.

There are various tags that you can use to change the size of your headlines. Use the larger font sizes for main headlines and get smaller as you go down the page. The biggest headline tag is h1. The smallest is h6. I would only use h1, h2, h3, and sometimes h4 for headlines, but h1 is the one I would use for main headlines most of the time.

Font size matters a lot in optimization. Main body text is usually around a 4 so any number less than that is a bigger font. Font color can also make a difference. It will stand out more. And you can even bold or italicize your text for even greater effect. But the h tags are the most important for optimizing those headlines.

Just like in page titles, you also want to use keywords. This is even more important than font sizes and color, which act as supporting optimizing elements. Put your keyword in the headline and just as you would in a page title, make sure the keyword is as close to the front of the headline as possible.

Category: SEO

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