SEO and Heading Tags

Importance of Heading Tags in SEO

Heading tags: These are the tags in HTML which are used to show that a particular text is important by making them bold. As the name suggests, these tags are used to display headings for a webpage or for a portion of text in the webpage.

The text appearing under these tags is made BOLD, thus separating it from the other text on the web page.

Search engines searches relevant and important text on the web page. If you are using heading tags, then crawlers assume that they (heading tags) represent something important on the web page. Thus they give certain weight age to the heading tags.

This is H1 Tag

This is H2 Tag

This is H3 Tag

The size and importance decreases from h1 to h3, that is h1 tag will have the largest font size and its importance is highest.

H1 tag can be used for showing the heading of the page, and ideally it should contain a mix and match of the content of the website with one or two keywords stuffed in between which should justify the text in h1 and the text in the web page content.

By using heading tags, you are making search engine’s job easy as the engine now has the summary of the web page, it knows now what the heading of the web page content is.

Remember, only heading tags can not help you to attain good rankings. You will need to follow other search engine optimization practices sincerely and ethically so that your web page can be crawled and indexed properly.


Himanshu Singh is the owner and founder of Bangalore based Internet Marketing firm Himshilp

SEO and Alt Text Tags

SEO and Alt Tags

Like Meta tags, Alt Text tags were also an important part of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) till few years ago. Now days the importance of Alt tags have been diminished.

Alt Text tags are meant for providing alternate text to the images, for visually impaired surfers. Stuffing keywords does not help them as they will be stuck in reading the same thing again and again, if keywords ate stuffed in all the alt tags on the page. For them, it will be keyword spamming. Probably this is the reason why all major search engines have started ignoring Alt Tags.

What does this mean?

Alt Text tags should be used for the purpose of representation of image. This was the purpose
of their creation so they should be used for the same. Never try to SPAM through alt tags, in fact you can use 2-3 instances of your primary keywords in Alt Text tags but try to avoid using more than that. Even W3C highly recommends the usage of ALT Tags to describe images. Do not use the text which is irrelevant to the image. If you are trying to fool search engine by excessive usage of keywords in Alt tags, then you are into “Black Hat” practice. Better to avoid this scenario as this will adversely affect your rankings if it backfires.

Final word

Rankings are determined by many factors and Alt Text is just one of them. Focus on this but do not try to use it excessively, instead use a combination of all other factors which will definitely increase your rankings.

Himanshu Singh is the owner and founder of Bangalore based Internet Marketing firm Himshilp

Importance of tracking website traffic

Importance of tracking web traffic

Keeping track of traffic on your website is vital. This is an important aspect of search engine optimization too. You need to know how much traffic your website receives everyday in order to make short term and long term marketing strategies. Also the tracking helps in fine tuning ROI from the website.

Very few website owners have idea about how many visitors visit their website, where they come from, which pages they visit. Website traffic tracking deals with the following

•How many people visit the website everyday, every month
•What is the source of the visits on the website that is from where the visitors
come?
•Segmentation and classification of traffic originating from search engines, PPC programs,
and affiliate network programs, links from other directories, paid banner advertising etc.
•What keywords are typed by the visitors in the search engines to reach the website?
•What is the typical navigation by a visitor on your website?

Answers to above can help you maximize the ROI and optimize your marketing spend.

There are many third party free online tools available which you can use to monitor the traffic. There are certain limitations on free accounts as you can not store more data through them. The paid options give you more storage and you can have data for a longer duration. The typical parameters which should be considered for web traffic monitoring are:

• The number of visitors
• Average number of page views per visitor
• Average visit duration
• Most popular pages
• Most popular landing pages
• Frequent exit pages
• Path of a visitor
• Source of traffic

Once you analyze the above parameters, you can work effectively on search engine optimization and you can significantly improve your ROI.


Himanshu Singh is the owner and founder of Bangalore based Internet Marketing firm Himshilp

What is Link Popularity and how it helps in Search Engine Optmization?

Importance of link popularity in Search Engine Optimization

What is link popularity?
Link popularity is the measure of the popularity of a website in terms of the incoming links it has got. This is the measure of how many domains / websites have a LINK reference for a particular website.

Most of the major search engines now have crawler based mechanism to assign rankings to any website in search results for keywords. Therefore link popularity has become an important concept as it plays a vital role in getting higher ranks in search results. Crawler based search engines love to hear from others. They do not have much interest in what you are boasting of yourself. This concept makes Link Popularity, an important aspect in Organic Search Engine Optimization. More the other websites refer you; more popular are you in the eyes of search engines.

I will quote a simple example here.

If you wish to advertise about your retail shop, the more effective way is to put up 100 banners at establishments throughout the town rather than placing all 100 at your retail shop. In first case, the other establishments are referring you so your importance increases and your visibility / credibility will also increase thus giving you advantage. Similar is Link popularity for a website.

Link popularity always pays in long run. If you are serious about search engine optimization, branding of your website then link popularity has to be given a good weight age as this over a period of time pushes your website in rankings amazingly.

Conceptually there are 4 types of links which are considered for increasing link popularity. Each type has its own weight age and importance in search engine optimization.

Internal Links: This refers to the internal links of your own website pointing to various pages within the website. These need to be properly structures in order to contribute for link popularity.

Free links: There are many website which provide free links to other websites to make their content look rich and to attract more traffic.

Link exchange: Link exchange is an agreement where two websites place links to each other. This technique was useful till a couple of years ago but due to its misuse search engines do not give much importance to it.

Paid links: Some directories, websites charge to place the other website links. The charge can be one time or recurring.


Link popularity is a tool, if used effectively can improve your search rankings drastically across the major search engines. The quality and relevance of the links coming to your website is important and has to be kept in mind while carrying this exercise.

Himanshu Singh is the owner and founder of Bangalore based Internet Marketing firm Himshilp