Formatting web Pages

There are some key points of information required to ensure that a search engine reads your web content in a fast and semantic way. Presenting your content to a search engine properly is so that it can understand and index easily the text within your page.

Many websites have content management systems which allow you to see the HTML code and whilst we are not delving deep into HTML, it is important to understand the best way to present your content.

Headings
There is a hierarchy of headings. The first and most important is H1 (heading one). Our example shows how the heading should be written in HTML .HTML is not really a computer coding language, it is a formatting language. So by letting the browser know when formatting starts and when it ends we can format our text.

<h1>Primary Heading</h1>

We open the heading using <h1> to let a search engine know this is our first and most important heading of the page. After our heading has finished we close it with </h1>. This is common in HTML. Subsequent headings will follow the hierarchy <h2>Secondary heading</h2>, <h3>Third heading</h3> and so on (normally until <h6>)

To display a paragraph we use <p>Your paragraph here.</p> formatting tags. Each paragraph will start with a <p> and end with a </p> for as many paragraphs as you have. If you require a line break then we use <br/> on its own. There is no opening or closing code for a line break.

Using this formatting language we are providing clear and semantic text to the search engines.

Additional HTML formatting tags we can use are like so:

Bullet points (known as unordered lists <ul></ul>)
<ul>
<li>• Bullet point one</li>
<li>• Bullet point two </li>
<li>• Bullet point three</li>
</ul>

Numbered lists (known as ordered lists <ol></ol>)
<ol>
<li>1. Number one item</li>
<li>2. Number two item</li>
<li>3. Number three item</li>
</ol>

Emphasis of keywords and salient points.
<strong>Bold</strong> the text.
<em>Italicize</em> the text.
<u>Underline</u> the text.

A classic mistake with web page formatting.

If you are using a content management system, do not copy and paste from Microsoft Word directly into your text editor. This is because all the formatting of the word document will be transferred to your website. We need to remove this "microsoft-eze" so the text is displayed quickly and without any redundant code. An easy way to do this is to paste the text into notepad and then copy and paste from notepad into your website text editor.

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