Beginner’s guide to formatting a webpage to improve SEO

There are many different ways to increase your website rank on search engine results, also known as search engine optimisation or SEO. Part of this process is formatting each webpage to be more readable for the search engine. The more the search engine knows and understands about your page the easier it is to be evaluated as relevant or not. Listed below are key steps in making your web page readable.

Headings

By giving each section of content a heading you are breaking the content down into manageable chunks. This is more appealing to the customer but also easier for the search engine to read. The search engine will focus on the words in the heading in order to know what that section is about. This is a good place to put your keyword thus reinforcing the relevance of that particular section.

Images

In likeness to the use of headings, the placement of images on a page breaks up the content making it easier to read. When adding an image onto your webpage you have the option of adding a title and description of what is on the image. What most don’t realise is that search engines don’t see images the way that humans do. If you have a picture of a dog being groomed on your dog grooming website, the search engine only knows that it is an image of something. By putting a heading and description the search engine knows that this image is relevant to your content and to the search term.

Links

By including a link to a trusted site that is relevant to your page content you are boosting the reliability of your page. Also if this link is to a related page of your website then you are improving navigation of your website thus refining the overall SEO.

“Read More” Break

By cutting your content off near the beginning and placing a “read more” link you are call the customer to action. Clicks on the read more link can be monitored as a conversion. For example you could have the Title of the page, an image and the first few lines placed in a section of the home page. When the customer clicks “read more” they will be taken to the page.

Key Words

Incorporating ample amounts of keywords to your page is key to achieving a higher ranking status. As aforementioned you should try to incorporate keywords in to the HTML or code of the page. There are several options including in the image title and description, in the content headings, SEO title and the meta description.

SEO Title

The SEO title is the name of your page in code form. Search engines pay close attention to the words used here. This is a step that most companies miss without guidance from professional digital marketers. It is particularly important to have you main keyword for your page in the SEO title. This will help boost the rank of the page in the search results. The SEO title is usually 60 characters long.

Meta Description

The meta description is a summary of your webpage and its content. The same as the SEO title this is part of the code. It is usually 160 characters long. Search engines will usually display this in the search results page.