Chris Anders - Internet Strategy Consultant

If you're unfamiliar with how web pages are constructed this article gives an overview of how "Header information" is important. Web pages are typically written in "HTML" which stands for hypertext markup language. Basically HTML is a series of codes or "tags" that tell Internet Explorer or whatever other browser you are using how the page should be laid out and what the contents of the page are.

Web pages are essentially made up of two parts. Within the HTML code essentially everything that you can see on a web page will be stored within whats called the "BODY" section. The other section is called HEAD - commonly referred to as the Header section. Information stored within the Header is not shown when you open a web page. It is used behind the scenes to store web programming, link to other resources, describe how the page should be laid out and a number of other functions. In addition it also contains important information about the content of the web page - this information is used by search engines to work out what your site and the page in question are about.

In terms of Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) there are a number of things to focus on in terms of what goes into this header section. Each web page has a TITLE tag. This is the most important "field" that you need to address. There are also a series of what are called META tags. Most importantly you need to consider:

1) the META Decription tag - a sentence or two describing what the page is about
2) META Keywords - words or phrases that might be used to search for the page

Entries elsewhere in this blog will describe how best to complete these.