Making pages attractive to both visitors and search engines!

By Bill Quimby
Posted Sunday, November 21, 2004

We all put keywords in the title and then the meta tags, but we often forget or skip the next most important place, in a headline tags. We know that they are important but we try to design attractive pages and use nice graphics that look better and can't work in a good way to use big headlines reasonably.

Well, I'll let you in on a valuable secret. Big headlines don't actually have to be as big as you might think. There are two parts to this trick. The first is to shrink the size of your big headline by using the font tags inside the headline. Don't shrink the entire headline, but put one character (I've been using a period) between the and the and I also only shrink it to 2 instead of 1. That makes it harder for a clever search engine to catch, since I suspect that they may penalize or ignore size 1words.

The code looks like this

.Keywords, Keywords.

You can see how it fits in and looks good on a page at (http://www.TollFreeNumbers.com)?heading It makes a really nice caption or tag line to a graphic like this and looks important to a search engine. I recommend using as much of the same things you put in your title and meta tags as possible.

You can take this trick one step further by combining it with another clever trick. The should be the first words on the page, so put them as high up in your code as possible. And if you have more than one screen height in content on a page you can hide the headline even further, by pushing it off the top of the visitors screen.

On a typical site you probably have several subpages. But there's nothing that says these pages have to start at the very top of the page. If you put a bookmark or name tag right after the headline (call it "TOP" so it sounds harmless and appropriate) and then add "#top" after page.htm in all your internal links and navigation. This will move the headlines off the top of the screen on all subsequent pages in the site. Some browsers seem to treat this a little different at times and it's still visible if they scroll up, but it still looks alright.

See (http://www.cheapest800.com)?heading for an excellent example of this on all the internal subpages.

Exciting design doesn't always look as attractive to search engines. So this lets you give the search engines what they want, a clear understanding of what your page is about, and still make your pages attractive to the visitors. Now, by making the title, meta tags, headlines, alt tags, page text and even a few comments and directory names thrown in for good measure, all focus on this unique line you'll rank as high as possible for your chosen phrase. Now you can have your design and your search success at the same time!

About the Author
Bill Quimby is the original Telenumeric Consultant!
-> Helping companies find 800 numbers that spell things
-> Finding matching domain name and 800 number combinations
-> Referral commissions for Ad agencies & website designers
Call: 1-800 MARKETER visit (http://TollFreeNumbers.com?box)