Sunday, December 6, 2009

How to Use Text for SEO

By Nicholas Halmond

One of the commonly overlooked aspects of SEO is using text format for SEO. By using specific tags and formatting techniques you are essentially highlighting particular pieces of information on your page as the most important and relevant. However, there has been some debate as of late whether or not using text formatting can improve your results and rankings.

As we all know, SEO is constantly changing, growing and evolving. The techniques of a few years ago are not guaranteed to work today, and nothing is guaranteed to work in a few months from now. As a webmaster or small business owner your job is to stay ahead of the game by learning from the available information and staying ahead of the latest trends and changes.

Using text format for SEO is as mentioned a way to highlight a particular piece of information as being the most relevant on your webpage. If you highlight a keyword or key phrase in this fashion you are therefore giving your page more relevancy for that search term, and a higher ranking can therefore occur.

When you make a text format for SEO change to your site you are producing a visual effect that people browsing your site will see. But the visual effect is not what's important, it's the attached significance of the tags used that adds value. For example, with the h1 title tag you demark the most important information on the page, it's what your page is all about. By working in a keyword into the H1 tag you are therefore showing that your entire page is directly related to that keyword.

You can follow the same strategy for the H2 tag. These tags are generally used as subheads within your content, and you can add additional significance to several more keywords by using them when you use the H2. The heading tags extend all the way down to H6, but after H2 they do not add much value whatsoever. So stick with the H1 and H2 tags and include keywords in them whenever you can.

Besides the headings that you use on your page, there are other text format for SEO options. One of these is marking a particular phrase, word or sentence as bold. However, the b tag just makes text bold, without adding any significance. What does add value and meaning to a phrase or word is the use of the strong tag. This will produce the same bold look but the strong tag adds to it an implied meaning of importance as well.

Text format for SEO is actually pretty simple in theory. Use a few selected HTML tags in order to highlight and emphasize keywords on a webpage, and therefore improve your ranking and relevancy for those terms. Yes, there is some debate about how effective these tactics are today. However, there is no downside to using them and until somebody can prove that it's not successful at all, using text format for SEO is a wise decision.

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