Working at a university presents a plethora of stories about students, faculty, and staff. Often, the funniest stories come from those who ignore the basics. A colleague of mine at Concordia University told me about a question he asked on a Computer Science final exam.

“What are the four terms/concepts illustrated on the cover of this semester’s textbook?”

Only two students out of twenty answered it correctly (one of them being my students *bragging*). Just as important to the cover and title of your book is the table of contents. Admit it, your grade school textbook’s table of contents was ignored. So often the Heading Tags, or better yet - the table of contents, are your guides to readability and usability.

 

Search Engines
The popular search engines use the often overlooked H1 - H6 tags as an overview of the page’s content. Starting at the top of the page, spiders skim the H1 tag (which is of course filled with juicy, targeted keywords) and move on to the smaller headers. H2 - H4 hold the most value, while H5 and H6 are rarely used by most of today’s developers and stylists. Imagine the Heading Tags almost like a bulleted list for the entire page. The easier you outline your page, the easier the spiders will find relevant content and keywords.

 

Users
It’s been proven that users don’t read, they skim. This is nothing new to those who study usability or user interactions. Creating text that stands out and makes your point clear is key to drawing them further down the page. This is key for those who run ads that are conveniently placed below the fold.

 

Heading Tags vary the text size, font weight, and style which draws the eye in, down the page, and to the words the user searched for. Be sure to include keywords and terms in these headings - it will engage both the user and the search engine agents.

 

Do we learn from our mistakes? We should - but the students of my friend didn’t. The next semester he asked the same question of the same students for a different book. No one got it that time.

Filed under: Marketing, SEO on March 12th, 2008