Thursday, December 3, 2009

Text Format for SEO

By Nicholas Halmond

Is there a way to take advantage of text format for SEO? There was a time when using specific formatting on your website was viewed as an extremely intelligent and reliable strategy. Now however many people are beginning to feel that this is no longer an effective strategy at all. The truth likely lies someplace in the middle for this SEO technique.

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.

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.

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.

When people talk about using text format for SEO, the above options are what they generally refer to. Have these been proven to be completely ineffective today? No, and it's likely they still play some kind of role in the ranking of your website in the search engines. Just remember to always stay ahead of the new trends and changes to the world of SEO and you and your website will succeed.

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