Here’s a nice example of what happens when you style your text to look like titles, but forget to use the semantically correct html tags. The following press-release by sony looks alright, and it’s easy to see what the title of the press-release is.
But techmeme seems to think that the article is called: “Resize text: A A A” as you can see in this screenshot:
How did this happen? Well, visually it’s easy to determine what the press-releases title is, but computer programs do not really see what the page looks like. Instead they read the source code, and try to determine the title of the article from the code. And in this case, the source code is pretty bad.
Html has an easy way to specify what your headings are: h1 through h6. But some people seem to think that using divs with classes to style them as headers are better. But you loose something valueable doing this: headers are mini-summaries for your content. By using divs instead of header tags, it becomes harder to find these mini-summaries in your page source-code. And there really is no reason why you should use divs. Headers tags can be styled just as easy as div tags.
You might think, why do i care? You might even like it this way, thinking that it prevents other sites from stealing your content. But that’s a very narrow minded point of view. Links are what makes the internet work. For one, they bring you visitors. And good links bring you more visitors. And having good titles ensures that automatically generated links have good text.
But more importantly, links are really important for search engines. Every link to your sites is a vote for the content on your site. And the text in a link tells a search engine what the link author thinks the linked page is about. And it the case above, search engines will think the link points to a page about “Resize text AAA”. That will not help when people are searching cybershot camera’s.
So links tell search engines what other people think your page is about. Header tags tell search engines what you think your webpage is about. And if both are screw-up, it’s really hard for search engines to determine what your page is about. Using semantically correct tags will bring more visitors to your webpage.
September 11th, 2008 at 14:33:24
It’s amazing how many webmasters or so called “seo experts” still don’t know the proper use of heading tags. First, many people forget they aren’t just used to inject keywords onto your web page but rather to “structure” the content so a search engine and web visitor know what the web page is about. Good to see more blog posts aimed at the proper use of header tags.