What is the most important part of your web page?
In the Cider House Rules, Author Rose challenges Homer with the simple question “And you know what your business is, boy?”, actually it was as much a statement as a question but the point was that Author Rose (played brilliantly by Delroy Lindo) knew what his business was and that Homer did not.
Most web pages are like young Homer, they don’t know what their business is, which gets them into trouble.
Yesterday I let you look under the hood of my website and see how I used the <h1> and <h2> title tags to tell Google what was important, while using Cascading Style Sheets to control how it appeared to my audience. This allowed me to show my readers a well structured technical document while ensuring that the marketing value of my page was also respected. Today, I want to spend a few paragraphs enforcing the importance of document hierarchy in online marketing and explain why structuring your document is important for making money on the web.
A web page is made up of two primary parts, the <head> and the <body>. These two areas have specific purposes and can most easily be understood by common users by explaining that the <head> is read by the browser but not displayed to the site visitor while the <body> is what we see on a web page. More accurately, the <head> of the document stores information relevant to computers, while the <body> is for people.
Within the <head> of the document is stored a <title> tag which contains the phrase displayed at the very top of a web browser, it is literally the <title> of the document which has significant implications with regards to your website and brings us back to the original question: What is the most important part of your web page? Both from a structural and a marketing perspective your title must not simply reflect the content of your web page but must broadcast it like a triumphant banner in moral war.
Your <title> tag is your business. It is what Google and all incoming links believe your web page is about. If your web page had a Facebook status, it would be it’s <title>. It would Twitter about the title, it’s RSS feed? The title. I hope my point is clear, whatever you have between your <title></title> tags is your most important message on your entire web page, it’s your business. Homer? His <title> was empty.
As for your page <body> there’s an equally important tag in the content displayed to your users. The <h1> tag is by default the biggest, boldest tag in the HTML arsenal for a reason, it commands respect. In the old days, when the web was young and mostly used by academics the <h1> tag was used properly by people. It embodied the very essence of the page because university types used it to encapsulate the most important part of the page, the title. That’s right … the where the <title> tag was used to tell web browsers, robots and search engines what your website was about the <h1> tag was used to tell readers, through document structure what the most critical part of your web page was.
Today, it’s often forgotten that we can use basic document structure to build better web pages. Building web pages to properly reflect the structure of your page content will both help decrease marketing losses and lower the technology budget of companies. Want to know how? Sign up for my RSS feed, or check back next week.
Nice article..
But according to your title of this post, I would say the most important part of my web page will be the header, it gets the most clicks conversion.
Its amazing how many people don’t even use the Title tag or use it improperly. I can’t count how many times I view a site and see the same exact title used for every page. I don’t know if its laziness or that they just don’t know any better.