Your Three Header Tags And Why You Need Them

Writing by Nick Stamoulis on Wednesday, April 9, 2008 Comments (3)

Header tags are also called meta tags. I call them header tags because they appear between the < head > and < /head > tags in your html source document. There are three of them that you need to concern yourself when it comes to your Search Engine Optimization efforts.

Here’s what they are:

TITLE

DESCRIPTION

KEYWORDS

First of all, these tags are important for Search Engine Optimization reasons. Your title and description tags will actually appear on the search engine results pages when your site is found for a particular query. The title tag is the first thing that searchers will see on the results page. It is also a link that when clicked takes the searcher to your website. That’s pretty important, right?

The description tag is often used as your snippet below the title link in the results page. If you optimize both your title and your description tag with your important keywords then you will increase your chances of ranking highly in the search engine results pages for those keywords.

The keywords tag is the least important of the three, but it’s still relatively important. Most beginning webmasters will make the mistake of adding every keyword important to their website to the keywords tag. You don’t want to do that. You only want to include 3-5 important keywords per page in that keywords meta tag. If a word doesn’t appear on a page, even if it’s important to your website as a whole, don’t include it in your keywords tag. It won’t help you.

Those are the three header tags that you need to pay attention to. They are not the be all end all to search engine optimization, but without the header tags you will struggle in the search engine results page.

Comments (3) Category: SEO

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3 Comments

Comment by morgan

Made Thursday, 10 of April , 2008 at 12:57 pm

Getting people to realize that the title and descriptions are important is a difficult proposition in my experience! Many people who don’t follow SEO too closely are still under the false assumption that keyword stuffing encompasses mostly good SEO — rather than the fact that keywords are almost irrelevant. To me, descriptions are very important, because it’ll pull those people on the fence about your articles from the SERPs to your actual pages, but only if you have an attention-grabbing dynamic description.

Comment by Nick Stamoulis

Made Thursday, 10 of April , 2008 at 3:06 pm

You are right that many new webmasters do not understand SEO and therefore do not understand the importance of these tags. Descriptions, as you say, are very important and if you don’t write a good one then the search engines will just take something from your page and put it in the SERP instead. This is where you have a little bit of control in how you appear in the SERPs.

Comment by Spyros

Made Wednesday, 25 of June , 2008 at 2:47 pm

Nice article for beginers, but I would make the title 2+1 Header Tags. 2 for Title and Description that are Metas recognized by all search engines and 1 for the Keywords Meta that is considered as “not so sure” by Google.