You can pay a lot for SEO – but what can you learn, right now, in one minute? An ongoing series.

When Google reads through your website it will try and work out what your website is about – this is so that Google can match your website up with search queries that your potential visitors might be making.

Make your important words stand out

Google, and your visitors, will pay more attention to text which stands out: headings, bold or italic text will call out to your visitors. Think about what your potential visitors are looking for and make sure that those questions are being answered in a way which is easy to find and see.

A good content management system will allow you to easily add headings and other formatting to the text on your website – and make sure that that formatting appears consistently throughout your site. Google won’t necessarily pay attention to the size or colour of text but it will pay attention to whether or not particular text is set as a “heading” and what level that heading is.

Be careful – setting all the text on your site to Heading Level 1 (the most important heading) is not going to help you out very much. Neither Google, nor your visitors, can get a lot of information if all of the text looks equally “important”. Use your headings in your website copy in the same way that you use headings in your other text copy: just pay a bit more attention to the keywords that you put in them!