The Importance of Proper Tagging
Over this past weekend I’ve done a little bit of research on the importance of H1 and H2 tags in HTLM, sometimes thought of as “title” and “sub-title” tags although here in WordPress you can select anywhere from H1 all the way down to H6. What I didn’t realize until looking it up, however, was just how crucial these tagged bits of text are when it comes to what the search engines recognize and respond to. Over on my other blog I played around with the tags and suddenly I noticed I was getting a lot more targeted visitors from Google searches. This took place literally within the space of a few hours and I was fairly flabberghasted to think what I might have been missing over the past month or so by not paying enough attention to something so relatively simple.
Of course, it could very well be coincidence. I’m hardly getting floods of traffic from keyword search results (yet!), but I didn’t really do anything partiularly different with the site. I’ll keep a close eye on it over the next few days of course, along with some more research, and if it turns out to be just a fluke or something I’ll be sure and mention it once again here on the Mindbla blog, but in any case it’s worth looking into.
What I’ve learned so far
As you can see above, I used a sub-heading (in this case, H3) which is supposed to be a good way to break up blog posts and give the spiders some sense of direction. So you can probably expect to see more of this in future from me. It looks nice anyway, and helps with the professionalism of the blog so it’s perfectly fine with me. I’m not so over-the-top that I’ll start gearing my blog posts to perfectly coded SEO keyword algorhythms or anything silly like that, but if learning to use the proper headings is useful I’m all for it.
I also learned that the title on a single post page should not be H1 (the blog title I mean, not the title of the article which should be H1 in fact), essentially you should have only one H1 per page and that’s it. The rest should be broken down into subheadings. My Coraline theme seems to take care of that automatically though, which is nice because I was just fixing to delve into all my past posts and switch all the headings around when I realized it was already automatically taken care of within the theme. So before you do anything drastic make sure you check out your single.php and page.php and style.css files to see what your theme is already taking care of for you, before committing to any sort of major adjustments or changes.
