Tuesday, December 1, 2009

How to Use Text Format 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.

Therefore as with everything in the search engine optimization field it's crucial to stay on top of the latest trends and change your strategies as necessary. What works today in regards to the correct text format for SEO may not work tomorrow. Either way, it's important to be aware of the theories that are out there and how they may able to affect the positioning of your website and all of its individual pages.

What exactly do people even mean when they say text format for SEO? What they are talking about is a way of using specific formatting tags to make pieces of your content stick out as more important to the search engines. There are visual formatting changes that take place, but of more importance is the emphasis placed on the terms that are formatted.

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.

After the H1 tag there are many other heading tags, going all the way down to H6. After H2 or H3 these tags lose their value and they should not be bothered with. However, effective usage of H2 as subheads throughout your content can certainly pay dividends in the same fashion that the H1 tag does. Include an additional keyword or two in the h2 tags you have scattered throughout your page and you can boost your rankings even more.

You can also work with text format for SEO within the body of your content. For example, by emboldening a keyword on a page you can also help to highlight the importance of that phrase on your page. However, to see the benefits of this approach you should not use the regular b tag for bold. Rather, you should use the strong tag, which produces the same visual effect but has attached to it the meaning of importance rather than just a visual change.

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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