Page Path: googlerank.com / ranking / Ebook / body.html

Topics: heading tags , their important role in Google ranking , publishing fresh contents on a daily base can boost your rankings like no-other known technique around

As you have learnt by reading META TAG and TITLE TAG subsections, meta tags don't help in assigning a relevance to a page, while text included in Title tag is considered by Google as an introduction to the contents of the page it is analyzing.
A page indexing will start by MATCHING text in TITLE TAG and the first words in the BODY of the page. Many experts identify the first 25 -twentyfive-words as most important when assigning a relevance to the whole webpage.

Therefore each page MUST start with some text (better if it's included in heading tags), rather than a table, an image, a shockwave animation.

Starting text has to include -but it's not limited to- same words that appear into TITLE tag. When Google has indexed both title and starting text, and has checked that there's full coherence between these two elements, a relevance (specific topic) is assigned. Then, a major role (in ranking the document) will be played by the so-called 'on page variables'.

In other words, the earlier your keywords appear the most relevance they'll get. We suggest to put your keywords on top of page, in H1 tag, and with a BOLD style.

: always be sure that the weight (in KB) of the html code is LOWER than the weight of the elements which are indexed by Google (TITLE Tag + texts + anchor texts + hyperlinked images' ALT)

THE ART OF WRITING GOOD, VALIDATED, HTML CODE

Google doesn´t index the HTML tags. But they need to download your whole page and parse/separate content from markup. If there are mistakes in your markup this separation process might not work. They do not index the code, but need clean code so that they can find your content within it. They also need to be able to find <Hx> tags, as well as title and alt attributes within tags, and so on.
They need to parse the HTML code to know what´s in h[1-6] elements, p elements, etc.

Google stops indexing after 101k of code so you would better have lots of content in those 100k than lots of HTML code.

There are five levels of HTML validation:

1. Find broken tags like <h2 or <a href="suck.html" Link/A>. These annoy browsers and spiders.

2. Find tags spelt wrongly like <IMGG="nowinvisible.png">. These trip browsers (and SE only on links).

3. Find wrongly nested tags <p><font="blarg"><b><i>Blarg</font><i><p></b>. These trip browsers.

4. Find tags that are not in the specification (i.e. IE or NN specific tags like <MARQUEE>). These work in specific browsers, and are ignored in all others.

5. Find tags that are deprecated. These are important only if you want total validation of your site.

Points 1, 2, and 3 are vital to fix.

While you are checking your HTML code in a validator, don't forget to validate your CSS as well.
HTML VALIDATOR: http://validator.w3.org/
CSS VALIDATOR:
http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/validator-uri.html

White Fly says...

Even if Google advices webmasters to create W3.org validated pages, full validation is still not required, as long as your pages does not contain evident errors. Of course, for a long term optimization you should always aim for a validation. Maybe tomorrow Google could accept only validated websites.

WHAT DOES GOOGLE REALLY LOOK AT?

1. Text used as a link (anchor text) - see LINKS section

2. Text into heading tags (H1, H2..), or not.
Heading tags must be put with a hierarchy policy: H1 or H2 for titles, H3 or H4 for subtitles,H5 or H6 for texts

3. Words in BOLD (<b></b> ; <strong></strong>). We suggest not to use a CSS to define bold fonts like

<style type="text/css">
<!--
.style1 {font-weight: bold}
-->
</style>

Use the proper html tags such as <B> or <STRONG> so Google can understand that certain words are emphatized within the document.

4. Greater consideration is given to the first 25 words of the webpage.

5. (Theoric) many experts affirm that a great consideration is given to HTML comment tags.

6. The webpage should contain MORE THAN 250 words.

7. Text into ALT attribute : can increase or decrease keyword density, BUT only text into ALT attribute of hyperlinked images is indexed.

8. Google has the ability to check WHEN a page has been published online , so it can verify if the page is updated often. A greater relevance is assigned to pages which are often updated . Even if you haven't modified them, it's good to re-publish your page constantly so it seems your pages are full of fresh contents. We believe this is one of the most effective (and easy) ranking strategies, but many webmasters tend to underestimate it...

White Fly says...

Do NOT write hostile, rude, vile, vulgar words or curses.
Google has a thesaurus of certain words which are considered BAD language and can cause you penalization. Plus, you should avoid using some certain combinations of normal words that change meaning when paired.