Search Words in the Code

In this section:  

• Checking the page headlines
• Checking the page titles
  
• Checking for a page description
• Checking for keywords
• More code to check

Checking the page headlines

If you aren’t familiar with HTML you’ll need to install Firefox  and the Firefox DeveloperToolbar in order to see the code underlying your headlines. If you are familiar with HTML, you can just view the source code to check your site.

In Firefox, view your homepage and click “Outline > Outline Current Element” in the Developer Toolbar. This will allow you to check the code of your web pages.

As mentioned on Search Words on a Web Page, search engines look at headings on a web page to analyze what the topic of the page is. Leaving them out, or leaving out the search words, makes your site less scan-able for people and less hierarchical for search engines. We humans can tell which lines of text are in headlines because of the size of the text. Search engines rely on the underlying code to understand what the page’s headlines are.

With “Outline Current Element” in the Firefox Developer toolbar selected, you can see the code as you hover over your main headline. In the picture below, the mouse is hovering over “FINE ART” on the web page and the code for that headline is showing right above the page.

The “h1” is the code that tells the search engine what the main headline of your web page is. You can see the “h1” showing at the very end of the line of code in the picture below. If your site has been built to be found in search engines you will see the “h1” code as you hover over the main headline of each page.

Here are the variations you may see in your main headline code:

Web pages should have a variety of headline sizes which indicate the top-level topic and the sub-topics within it. H1 is the top level headline. It should correspond to the main topic of your web page. The next level down is the H2, which should be used for sub-topics. If you have a lot of text on your page without H2’s, consider adding them for readability and for search engines.

If you are not seeing H1’s and H2’s on your site this is something that needs to be fixed immediately. H1 and H2 text is very important for search engines. Remember to include your search words in headlines.

Common mistakes with headlines:

• Text is in a graphic. If you can left click over the headline and see the option to “save image as, then your text is in a graphic.*
• Text doesn’t include search terms
• Web page doesn’t have “h1” and “h2” in code.
• “h1” or “h2” used for the section name, rather than the page name. For example “Products” as the “h1” for every page in the products section, rather than using the “h1” for the type of products unique to each page.
• “h1” or “h2” used for site identity on every page. For example the company name.

*If you left click and see something about a “background image” in the menu, you may have a situation where the text has been positioned off the screen but search engines can still see it in the code. If you’re not sure on this point, and you don’t know HTML, ask your web designer or developer to explain how the h1 code is working. If you are familiar with HTML, you should be able to find your h1 text by viewing the source code of your page and searching for “h1."

Checking the page titles

The titles of your pages can be seen at the top of the window, above the web page itself. You can see the title of http://cats.about.com in the sample below:

The information in the page title is especially important to search engines. If you are working with low-competition search words and you have high quality content, changing the text on your headlines, page titles, and adding search engine-friendly navigation will be enough to take you to the top of search engines.

In the above example, you can see “About.com” has kept their branding very short in the page title. A common mistake is to give branding top priority, and search terms second priority, for example putting “About.com, sharing their passions, expertise and how-to information” in every page title. Your search words should be first (remember your region if you are using geotargeting) followed by branding. For example: “Plumber in Smallville, IL | Joe Schmoe Plumbing."

Each landing page needs a unique page title that corresponds to the words you would like people to find the page for in search engines. This has two purposes. First, search engines will find the page. Secondly, they will display the words that were searched for in bold in search results. Here is About.com listing Google’s search results for the search “cats."

See how the word “cats” is bold in the listing? For someone searching for “cats” in Google, it looks like this page pretty much fits the bill. You can see how much more effective this is than if About had used ”About.com, sharing their passions, expertise and how-to information” as the page title.

Checking for a page description

You may be wondering where the description of the About Cats page that shows in the Google listing came from. In this case, it came from the description About provided for search engines. You can see this text yourself by checking the meta tag information of one of your web pages under the Information menu in the Firefox Developer Toolbar (see top of page for toolbar info).

The “description” field in the page that opens will show how your page is being described to search engines. Search engines don’t always use the page description in their listings, but they often do. Studies show that people often don’t even look at the page titles in search engine listings – they go right for the page description. So it’s very important to add well-thought out descriptions to your landing pages.

Tips for good page descriptions:

• Use search words
• Explain what the page is about
• Stay focused on information people will be searching for rather than giving general company information
• Have a custom description for each important page
• Get to the point quickly – the people who are reading this are scanning search results.

Keep in mind people are using this information to decide whether to visit your page or not.

Checking for keywords

Keywords aren’t visible on the web page, just like the page description. They were intended as an area for webmasters to communicate to search engines which search words were relevant for the page. Sounds great doesn’t it? Why fool around with page titles, descriptions, “h1” and “h2” if you can just TELL the search engine what words they should show the page for?! Well, there were problems. People weren’t very scrupulous about this in the early days of the web – either including irrelevant words, or repeating words multiple times. That behavior caused search engines to discount keywords to a large extent. Now keywords are considered helpful in getting a site listed in search engines, but not nearly as important as having good content with search words.

To find the keywords on your web pages, click on “meta tag information” under “information” in the Firefox Developer bar (see screenshot above). Keywords are generally search word phrases, separated by commas. They should be specific to the page, not the same list of words on every page. Keywords, like page descriptions, are most important on pages with important search words. Some pages of your site, like “contact us," aren’t important pages for search engines and so they don’t need descriptions or keywords.

More code to check

If you’ve written high quality content and your site has search-engine friendly navigation, search terms on the page, and search terms in the code (detailed in this page), your site is ready for search engines. There are further steps you can take with search word placement which are outside the scope of this website. Please see the “Additional Factors” page for ideas.