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On page SEO factors – Part 3

Your headline – the attention grabber near the top of your page.

Chances are that you’ve got a common heading across your site with your company logo, etc.

After that, the next thing on the page should be the page’s headline.

It serves the same purpose as a newspaper headline – it should get you interested enough to encourage you to at least start reading the rest of the page.

Like the rest of search engine optimisation, this is a trade off between writing for the search engines and writing for actual site users. Personally, I write for real users first but with a “back of mind” thought that the search engines need to find the headline useful as well. It’s do-able – it may just take a bit of thought!

If you need help deciding on keywords to target (words or phrases that real people are searching for) then there are a couple of tools you can use:

• Google’s keyword tool – the format changes every now and then but it’s free and you can get reasonably accurate data on what people have searched for in the past and any seasonality. It’s worth playing around with but don’t get drawn into it to the exclusion of everything else.
• Micro Niche Finder – this draws information from the Google keyword tool and then adds lots of other factors such as how much competition there is for a particular keyword. If you’re targeting keywords, one nice feature is a traffic light system for how competitive a keyword is. It’s the best paid-for keyword tool I’ve found. It’s worth buying if you’re regularly researching keywords. If not, stick with the free Google option.

The next section of this free search engine optimisation course is about your page content.