SEO for Page Headings

Page Headings need to contain keywords from the URL.

As search engines calculate the combined total of keywords on the webpage, it is important to ensure there is consistent use of the keywords in the page heading that are used in the URL. This provides a compound effect for search engines to increase the relevancy of the webpage which produces higher search engine rankings.

The following list summarises the important points for consideration:

1. Search engines generally ignore common words like "the", "a", "are", "is", "of", etc - your URLs will therefore do just fine without them.

2. Phrases like "How to do this" or "Which is the best" or "What are the options" or "When did this happen" make titles attractive but you need not put these words in the URL. For instance, the URL is "stop-junk-mail" for the article "How to Stop Junk Mail."

3. If something important doesn’t fit in the page title, put it in the URL. For instance, the URL of a page titled "Get your search fix with two videos" is like "free-search-seo-video" - so you have two new words ("free" and "seo") in the URL that were not in the title but do help in describing the underlying web page.

4. Use hyphens (or dashes) to separate keywords in URLs though Google can also read underscores.

Google probably assigns some fixed weight to your URLs which gets distributed across different words used in that URL. Now the weight per keyword will obviously dilute when you have long URLs.

Therefore, it will help if you can manually create URLs with lesser number of keywords but they should also be relevant to the context of your content. It requires a little extra effort at the time of writing your blog post but they may reap good benefits in the long run.