Your Guide for refining the Semantic Web Markups

I increased my search engine traffic by 258% in less than a month and so many of you started asking me Balkhis what did you do. I was loaded with the emails therefore I have decided to write a series of post.

This is a second part of the series post. First post in this series is very essential: Most Effective SEO Move You Can Make for your Website. You must remember, this post will not benefit as much if you don’t follow my guide on the post before this one will not be as helpful.

As I mentioned in my Case Study that I refined my heading tags (h1, h2, h3 and more…) Well people asked me what do you mean by refining those tags. How did you refine them? So this guide will show you the moves that I made. You should know that Google recommend XHTML Semantics. And many free themes doesn’t even use it that well. Heck my previous themes weren’t as good as it could have been.

Refining the Semantic Web Markups

Before we begin to refine these markups, we need to know which markups to have on each page. You need to have the following markups in the meaningful order: (<title><h1><h2><h3><h4>…)

I don’t think you would need to go further than h4, but you are free to go there. Remember you need to use them wisely, and in a logical order, so <h1> is the most important followed by <h2> and so on. So use them in the logical order assigning the important parts of the page with the right type of heading tags.

Take a look at the images below before I start discussing each of these markups. (Click on the image to see the full view)

Explanation of each Markups

First Rule – Fix your Titles

Fix your titles on your page because they are going to matter between you ranking on the first page or the second.

These are <title> tags the most important tag on your web page. The second thing that Google checks when ranking the site is this <title> tag. So you know how important it is. The first thing they see is the keywords in the url then the title (We are leaving the popularity aside for some other post). Guys make sure your title in the wordpress are SEO Friendly.

The titles that came in with the default wordpress: Blog » Page

That is not the best title you can have for your blog.

The first post in this series can help you get the title right. So check it out if you want to rank high and increase your search engine traffic like I did.

Efficient use of <h1> Tags

You have no idea how many people overlook <h1> tags. This is the tag which tells the search engine what is the most important part on the page. Personally I use image as my logos, so I don’t worry about having these at the logo. Instead, I keep my post title inside <h1> tags. You must remember, you can only HAVE ONE <h1> tag on any given page, so I suggest you use it wisely.

I have posted the image screen shot above on both the home page and the post page to show you how I am dealing with it on Balkhis to give you an idea.

People who don’t use <h1> tag, and just use <h2> for all their posts are on the dark side. That is what sets best aside from good. I am going to tell you specially on the posts page because they are very important, make sure you have your title in <h1> tag as long as your logo is an image.

Rebirth of good posts with headlines

I decided to use headlines in the post because they are appealing. They look much better than the normal bold feature in wordpress. But there was another reason why I used it, and I am still using it. That is because of the search engine advantage. Since your title on the post page is <h1> then you should highlight your main areas in the post with <h2>, <h3>, and other tags as they fit.

I use <h2> tag for the main headline in the post, and then <h3> and <h4> accordingly depending on how I want the post to look, and how it is categorized. I suggest you start with <h2> and work your way down. Think of your posts as an outline.

I know a lot of blogs don’t use these features in their post. Which is their personal choice, but I am sure you will start using them right now. First the bold just look ugly. This way you have more variety and you can organize your posts well. Next is search engine loves organization. So it is a win win for you. Search Engines happy, and your users are happy.

Sidebar Headings and misconceptions

People just tend to use <h2> tags for their sidebar tags. Do you know how many people use that. Heck I used to do that as well until I discovered these techniques. Really think about it, are your sidebar headlines as important as your post headlines? I don’t think so. Well maybe some of them, but not all. I am using <h2> tag in my sidebar for some things, and <h4> for the others just to highlight the differences between the most important part and not.

Just make sure you distinguish them. I know I used to put all of them as <h2> before and I was also the one to put my post titles to be <h2> also. Until I realized it doesn’t really make sense. Most free designs will come like this, so if you are using a free theme, you got some editing to do. I don’t know how well coded these premium themes are, but you can count on my next themes (maybe Premium) to be SEO Friendly using all these aspects.

Home Page Explanation

I am sure you guys see I have my featured post wrapped around in <h1>. The reason for that is because that is the most important area on my site. I noticed this way I tend to rank high for that particular keyword for that day just because of the homepage. And that post rank high for the keyword later on as well. Then you will see in my category excerpts I am using a combination of <h2> and <h3> tags. I assigned the category title with <h2> tag and Post title with <h3> because I think this is the way they are organized the best. Like I said think of it as an outline of your paper.

Points to be Noted

Make your WordPress Titles SEO Friendly
Only use <h1> tag ONCE and only ONCE on the page.
Add headlines to your posts and they will keep your content organized.
Organize your sidebar headings and give them less weight than your content.

Guys, I am not going to say if you don’t make these SEO moves you will be doomed. But remember there are several good websites, but only few best ones. This is one of those factors that sets aside the best and help search engines like Google to think of you as best also.

So what I am saying is that if your site and another site is very close in authority such as backlinks, age and other factors. But the other one have a few more backlinks then you do that is why it was ranking higher then you. And you make these changes, you will most likely be placed above that site. This is how I gained most of my search engine ranking.

While these techniques sounds so basic, you need to remember that everything starts at a simple step. People now a days are so into the complicated stuff, they forget to get their building blocks. Good SEO is the building blocks of a website. So make sure you have your backbones strong. Even though these techniques are old school, you have to understand that a lot of old schoolers are the one that do well in SEO. And the reason for that is because they combine the old school with the new school. So do the above and join the road of excellent sites. Otherwise there is nothing wrong with being just good.

I just like perfection… Thats why I did it, and I got awesome results…

Keep up to the blog for the next posts in the series as well. If you are not subscribed, you should, so you can be updated.