SEO Explained - Page 11
On page headings & page length

HTML Page Headings

HTML, in addition to having special tags for <title>s, description and keywords, also contains special tags to identify Headings on a page.   These are labelled <h1> for Heading Type 1, <h2> for Heading 2 etc.   H1 is a large font heading and the most important.

You should ensure you have 1 <H1> </H1> tag on each page containing your most important keyword phrase such as:

<h1>Nike Sneakers by Bob’s Shoes, Atlanta</h1>

Breaking up the content on your pages with 2 or 3 <h2> tags is also good practice.   You may find that the <h1> style doesn’t align well with the graphic design that you’ve come up with or that your designer has.   You may need to override the default H1 style using a style sheet entry such as:

h1 {
font-size: small;
color: green;
}

….or similar.   This allow you to ensure that your use of h1 will match the rest of the look and feel or style of the site.  This can be done for h2, etc. also.

Landing Page Design

Aside from the specific optimisation of the keywords and page structure, some consideration to the layout and messages on your important products and services page is also important.   See our page on “Landing Page Design” in our Google Adwords eBook which contains some detail on this area of page design & layout.

How much content should you have on each page?

This is another hotly debated topic in the SEO community.   The figures you’re likely to hear most often are between 300 – 500 words on a page.    You definitely want to have *some* content on a page to give the search engines enough material to be able to effectively determine what your page is about, and to give you a place to include important keywords and phrases that you are optimising the page for.

My personal view, and experience is that you could do a lot worse than following the popular advice of around 300 words of content.   If you put many many thousands of words on a page, then having individual terms showing as distinct on that page (ie higher density) requires a greater number of placements of those terms.   This is something you can experiment with to see what works for you, but having no content or a tiny amount of content (i.e. a couple of sentences) is not recommended.

Page 12 - Sitemaps & Image ALT Text