Web Promotion Elements - Head? Header Tags? What the...?

Published: 2nd of April 2007

By now, even web promotion novices are bound to have heard of meta tags and header tags; but what are they and what practical purpose do they serve during the course of site web design and promotion?

Whilst the majority of web designers and search engine optimisers seem to preach about the importance of meta tags, header tags, W3C compliance, et al; precious few ‘professionals’ seem to be willing to render a satisfactory explanation about the reasoning behind their advice. In fact, the industry’s old ‘secret society’ attitude still seems prevalent to this day.

Secret Society?

When I first became entangled in the computer industry back in 1993, computers (of the 486 ilk) were just entering the public consciousness and slowly becoming a part of daily life. In those days, the average techie was seen to be possessed of an arcane knowledge due to his or her understanding of the machine’s wily ways and proficiency in a mysterious language, known only as ‘DOS’.

Although times have of course changed, and computers are now very much a simple and seemingly indispensable part of our daily lives, the attitudes found, especially within some sectors of the web promotion industry, have been carried over from those early days.

But whilst each professional does of course have methods and approached he or she considers to be ‘tricks of the trade, is there really any sense to keeping these individuals keeping their clients completely in the dark about even the most basic web promotion elements?

Of the things which cause confusion amongst novice web promoters and online business owners the Page Head versus the Header Tag is possibly one of the most commonly misinterpreted.

So what is the difference between a Page Head and a Header Tag and how do they help my web promotion efforts?

The Page Head: forms the first part of an HTML document. This includes the Page Title, Meta Description and Meta Keywords tags amongst others. Clicking on the image to the right will show how the Page Head fits into the source code of an HTML page (Or click here).
A Header Tag: Looking towards the top of the page, you will see this page’s H1 tag (Web Promotion Elements - Head? Header Tags? What the...?). These act in a similar way to a newspaper headline and run (getting progressively smaller) from H1 to H6. The common statement is that search engines place greater value on keywords contained within a Header Tag, but experience shows that this is only true if the keywords or phrases in the header tag are actually relevant to the rest of the page’s content. Furthermore, this particular web promotion element should not simply be stuffed full of keywords. Instead it works far more effectively if written for human visitors rather than search engine spiders.

Whilst this short article is of course far from comprehensive, I hope it has provided at least a brief insight into these two, possibly the most misinterpreted, onsite web promotion elements.

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Onsite Web Promotion Elements such as the Page Head and Header tags

Click image for a brief explanation of Page Head Components & Tags

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