After chatting with some colleagues, I decided a good topic for discussion would be proper page formatting and internal linking. Both of these aspects are often over looked or under emphasized on new websites. Remember, it is little things like these that give you a solid SEO foundation when growing your website. This article will just cover the simple basic, I’m not a super geeky tech guy, but I can show you what works in my experience.

Proper Page Formatting

I see poor formatted pages all the time, daily in fact. Now to be clear, when I say “page formatting” I’m basically referring to the layout of the page and “htags”. We could get into code bloat, css, etc, but I’ll leave that for another article and to someone smarter than me. Anyway, let’s get on with it.

Let’s take a simple example. We are adding a page to our website which is about “Poker” and the page we are adding is called “Poker Tools’. Now, of course we should have already decided what are page is going to be about, and in this process you should have already decided how to lay your page out. Whenever you are writing an article you should know the layout, know the topic, know what your visitors want to read about, and know how you plan on building the page. these are key steps that you must follow, otherwise you are just randomly adding content. While adding content in general is a good thing, we want to add powerful optimized pages as well.

Page Layout

1. So, our new page is called “Poker Tools”, our first step is the name the page which will be something like : domain.com/poker-tools/ – <<- the url is important because it is descriptive to your visitor and to the almighty search engines.
2. Next we want to name the header or the “title” of the article, this will usually be close or identical to the name of the page, in this case it will be “”Poker Tools” – Whenever you make the header, it should always be in an <h1> tag and should look like this:

<h1>Poker Tools<h1>

Htags do a couple things, most Custom Style Sheet are set to make your “h1 tag a larger font size than normal, and it tells the search engines exactly what this page is about. Htags are a powerful SEO tool when used properly, and it helps your visitors get a quick visual idea of what the page is about.

3. So, we have made a header, added content to the first section of the article. Bow, I always break my articles up into separate sections. So, in our example out page is about “Poker Tool” and we made the “<h1>” tag emphasize “poker tools at the beginning of our articles. So, after we write some intro text about poker tools, we will move on to the next section which might be called “Top 5 Poker Tools” which we will place in an <h2> tag and will looks like this:

<h2>Top 5 Poker Tools<h2>

Again, we are doing this for two reasons, its a great way to grab and keep the reader attention, and its tell’s the SE’s what the page is about. Now think about this, do you like to see webpages with no structure and paragraphs that you don’t know what they are about? Or do you like an organized page? The answer is simple. Note” of course “Top 5 Poker Tools” could be a separate page and probably should be IMO, but for this exercise its not.

4. Now that you understand some more about basic “htags” we can move on to even simpler things like keyword emphasis. In our example article several of our keywords are in “htags” which makes them bigger, and bold. But we will also want to stress some smaller keywords like let’s say “Poker Tracker” or “Hold’em Manager” which is listed in out  “Top 5″ section.

We know we put an “<h2> around the phrase “Top 5 Poker Tools” and within that section we list – Poker Tracker, Hold’em Manager, Poker Ace, Poker Stove, and SNG Wizard for example. Now, since we already have “htags” in the section where we are discussion the “Top 5 Tools” we are going to take a different approach to emphasize these keywords we want to rank for. it will look like this

<h2>Top 5 Poker Tools<h2>

Random example text of this section, blah, blah, blah – The best Top 5 Poker Tools are:

Poker Tracker - Random info about poker tracker

Hold’em Manager - Random info about HM -

Note: Notice how these main keywords are bold, and if you look at the html code it looks like this:

<strong>Poker Tracker</strong>, which again places special weight on this word and attracts the users attention

Simple tips like this one are a great way to increase visitor retention time, and it shows the SE’s exactly what the pages are about. I encourage you to try this on your next website or pages and you will see the results first hands.Proper page formatting is essential to a well balanced website.

Alright, thats all I have for now, don’t forget to leave a comment and remember that after a few days all comments are “do follow.” Also, please let me know what other topics you would like to see discussed on here.