Anatomy of a web page

Every web page should contain some basic elements to provide the best experience for the user and also assist the search engines to understand what the page is about.

The elements are a combination of usability standards and common sense. Just think like a visitor to your pages and ask yourself what you’d want to see.

Let’s say you were looking for a new lawn mower …

Title

Always use a descriptive title.

Try not to use generic titles like Products. From a usability standpoint, your visitors will stay longer and view more pages if your page titles are informative and descriptive. If your site was about lawn mowers, try to use a title such as Riding lawn mowers, push lawn mowers, lawn mower parts and more.

Meta tags

Keep your meta description and keywords tags short and to the point.

There is no value to the user or the search engines to stuff keywords in your meta tags. Some search engines will use your meta description as your page description in their search listings, so make your description count because it may be that catchy sentence that gets the user to click on the search listing!

For our lawn mower example, try a description like: We offer a great selection of riding lawn mowers, push lawn mowers and lawn mower parts for all makes and models.

Your keywords meta tag should contain words that describe exactly what your page is about such as: lawn mowers, riding lawn mowers, push lawn mowers, lawn mower parts. Don’t include keywords that have nothing to do with the content on your page.

Heading tags

Every page should have a single H1 heading and it should be the first line of content on the page after your header and navigation. This tells the users and the search engines that the text contained in the H1 tag is the most important on the page.

The H1 heading tag should contain the phrase that best describes your page. In the case of our lawn mower example, the H1 heading would be Lawn Mower of course. You should follow your H1 tag with a few sentences that explain your H1 phrase in more detail such as: We offer a great selection of riding lawn mowers, push lawn mowers and lawn mower parts for all makes and models. We carry the top products from all the leading brands. Our factory trained sales team can help you find the right part for your mower. If we don’t have it in stock, we can get it in 24 hours.

Some times, search engines use the H1 tag and the first sentence of content after the H1 as the description of your page in the search listing. Keep this in mind.

After your H1 tag you should add a few H2 or H3 tags to your page using phrases and descriptive paragraphs that are variations of your H1 tag. For example: riding lawn mowers and push lawn mowers and lawn mower parts.

Final thoughts

When building pages, you should consider what the best user experience will be and the search engines will reward your pages with a better rank. If the users like your pages because they are structured in a way that is descriptive and informative, they are likely to stay longer, visit more pages and buy whatever you are selling.

A good title will mean that you have your keywords in the anchor text of the link. An inbound link with anchor text such as: Riding lawn mowers, push lawn mower, lawn mower parts and more is much more descriptive to the user and also valuable for search engine rankings than anchor text of Products.

I created a sample page using all the suggestions above. Please have a look a the sample and also view the source of the page to see the meta tags, H1, H2 etc.

Enjoy!