Most bloggers struggle with technical issues when it comes to their blogs.

In general that’s okay because as long as you focus on the power of your words you will do well.

However sometimes there are a few tech tricks and tips worth learning just to give you that little extra edge.

Today I have a simple search engine optimization (SEO) tip for you that if you take the fifteen minutes necessary to learn it and make it a habit, will improve how your articles rank in search engines like Google.

HEADING TAGS

I bet when you write articles for your blog you currently use BOLD to highlight headings.

There’s a special HTML code that you can use to highlight headings that search engines like to see. They are called heading tags and work like this:

<h1>Heading goes here</h1>

You can also use “h2″ and “h3″ to distinguish lower heading types like sub-headings.

When I write articles to my blog I use the WordPress plain text editor, not the visual editor, which handles the code for you.

Using the plain text editor you can enter code directly, so whenever I need to use a heading I use <h2> or <h3> tags to highlight my sub-headings.

By default my blog design makes the main title of each article a <h1> tag, which is why I use the lower level heading numbers for sub-headings - you don’t want to saturate your article with too many “<h1>’s”.

<h1> is the most important heading tag used for top level headings and really should only be applied for your main article heading.

This is a simple habit I have kept ever since I studied SEO and learnt how powerful heading tags are.

You see when Google and other search engines come and index your blog articles they value the content in heading tags as more significant indicators of what your article should rank well for.

By using heading tags you can anchor certain keywords in your blog article as more powerful and more relevant - the words you want your article to rank well for in searches.

This might be a challenging topic for you and if that’s the case I suggest you go to one of your older articles, find a heading and then replace the bold you used and instead wrap around a <h2> at the start and a </h2> at the end and see what happens.

What you see next will depends on the system you currently blog with, so I can’t guarantee it will work.

If your sub-heading still looks larger than your main text then the heading tags are doing their job. If however you can see the actual <h2> code in your blog article then your system isn’t set up to process the HTML.

You may have to experiment or ask for help from your tech person.

You can also try this tutorial on heading tags:

http://www.tizag.com/htmlT/htmlheadings.php

Once you know this little trick, future technical issues won’t seem as daunting. There’s not much more than little code fixes like this to learn how to optimize your blog for search engines, at least from an internal perspective.

Categories: Blogger Tools and Tips
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