A Primer on Simple and Effective SEO
Headers are more important than paragraphs, and the text at the top of a page is more important than the text at the bottom of a page. That’s it. That is the foundation of good SEO. I just saved you from spending thousands of dollars on an SEO consultant.
Over the next few episodes, I’m going to be talking about Why Your Photography Website Should Have a Blog, How to Maximize the Potential of Your Consumer Photography Website, and How to Maximize the Potential of Your Commercial Photography Website.
And the primary reason is SEO, search engine optimization. But when I was writing these episodes, I realized that most photographers don’t have a solid understanding of SEO. So, I wanted to give you a primer on what you need to know to create excellent SEO value for your website. I’m going to go into a bit of detail here, but that one sentence is the underlying foundation of everything we’re going to build on over the next few episodes.
Today, I’m going to give you a simple breakdown of SEO as it pertains to structuring and formatting the text on your website. I’m not going to talk about backlinks, black hat or white hat SEO tactics, or even try to decipher whether or not directory listings offer any real SEO value. No, it already sounds confusing and that’s not what this episode is about.
Today, we are focusing solely on your website, and specifically, the structure of the text on your website.
Text is Structured Data
The first thing you need to understand is that search engines, like Google and Bing, look at a website and consider the text on that website to be structured data. Search engines are built by engineers, and engineers love structure. Search engines assume there is a structure to the text presented on a website, the same way a textbook contains structure, such as a preface, table of contents, chapters, paragraphs, bullet lists, and illustrations. The way search engines interpret the structure of a webpage is through HTML.
Many people think HTML tells the browser how to display that text, but that is incorrect. The function of HTML, which stands for Hyper-Text Markup Language, is designed to tell a browser how the text of a webpage is structured. It has nothing to do with design. The design of a webpage is handled by a completely separate document referred to as a style sheet. In web design, these are called Cascading Style Sheets.
If a web page was a slice of pie, with a crust, filling, and some whipped cream. The text of your website, that is the words that are displayed and read by a visitor to that page, those words are the filling. That’s the juicy good stuff that everyone wants to get to. HTML is the crust. It’s what gives the pie structure. And CSS, or Cascading Style Sheets, are the whipped cream on top, the design elements that make it all look nice. And since style sheets are completely irrelevant to this discussion, I’m not going to mention them again.
So, every web page has three separate components: the data (the text, the images, the videos, etc.), its structure, and the design.
All you need to focus on right now is structure. HTML is structure. It’s the blueprint. It’s the outline. It’s what says this text is a header, this text is a paragraph, this text is a link, or this text is a caption. HTML is structure. Search engines look at that structure to assign different levels of importance to different textual elements.
Structure Has Hierarchy
There are two types of hierarchy to consider in a webpage, and those are:
The importance of information as outlined by the structure (HTML).
The importance of information as told by the priority it is given.
Since HTML is structure, and structure has a hierarchy, then that means HTML has a hierarchy. This is why there are six different levels of headers, from H1, H2, and H3, which are the most commonly used headers, all the way down to H6.
There’s also the hierarchy as told by the order in which information is given. That is, what comes first. On a web page, the information that appears at the top of a page tends to have higher priority than the information that appears at the bottom of the page. So, search engines assign greater importance to information that appears at the top of a page than they do to information that appears at the bottom of that same page.
So, sticking with the text, search engines use HTML to determine the structure of a webpage (such as its titles, headings, paragraphs, and lists) and assign importance based on that structure and the order in which those elements appear on that page, from top to bottom. Does your head hurt yet? Let me recap and simplify it for you. Write this down and on a Post-It Note and stick it to your monitor, if you need to:
Headers are more important than paragraphs. The text at the top of a page is more important than the text at the bottom of a page.
That’s it. This is the foundation of good SEO. It’s that simple. Don’t overthink it.
Hierarchy of Importance
So, now that you understand that hierarchy is important, the question becomes: In what order should we be thinking about creating the text of our web pages and blog posts? Let’s go back to our textbook analogy. If we think of the structure of a textbook, that book has a title, a table of contents, and chapters. Those chapters have titles and sections, those sections have headers and paragraphs and subsections, which can also have headers and paragraphs and subsections, and so on.
Now, let’s apply that structure to your website. Your website has a title, navigation, and sections. Those sections have titles, subsections, and paragraphs. Those subsections can also have headers and paragraphs and more subsections, and so on. My consumer photography website is titled Blackwood Studios, and sections for wedding photography, destination wedding photography, engagement photography, and family photography. The wedding photography section has a subsection called Your Wedding Photography Experience, which has subsections called “In-Person Consultation,” “The Wedding Day,” and “The Design Consultation.” It has structure.
So, keeping in mind that the order in which things appear on a page, from top to bottom, matters, the importance of the HTML on any given page is:
The URL of the page.
The title of the page.
The H1 header.
The H2 header.
The H3 header, and so on, down to H6,
The paragraphs of text.
Best practices are to only have one H1 header on any page, and it usually matches the title of that page exactly. It can be different, but I don’t recommend that. Keep the title and H1 header the same.
Structure. Hierarchy. That’s the basis of SEO.
