SEO A to Z - part 10 - "H1 to Hub & Spoke"

Hello and welcome to. Seo is not that hard. I'm your host, ed Dawson, the founder of keywordspeopleusecom, the place to find and organise the questions people ask online. I'm an SEO developer, affiliate marketer and entrepreneur. I've been building and monetising websites for over 20 years and I've bought and sold a few along the way. I'm here to share with you the SEO knowledge, hints and tips I've built up over the years. With you, the SEO knowledge, hints and tips I've built up over the years. Hello and welcome back to the latest episode.

This show is not that hard. It's me, Ed, here, as usual, and today we're on to part 10 of our SEO A to Z, where hopefully we'll get from H1 to hub and spoke in today's episode. So let's crack off with H1. So H1 is the most important of the header tags for SEO. You really should have one h1 per page and it should contain the title of what your page is about. Now h1 tag is it's the main header for a page. So if you're using wordpress, your h1 tag will be the main page title. If you're using another cms, then just look up how to do h1 for that cms. They will all be able to do it and it's just key to make sure that you've got a good descriptive H1. That's nice and keyword rich that explains what the purpose of the main content of your page is all about and it's really important, so make sure you have one.

Next, we've got hacked content. Now hacked content this is a black hat technique that actually is illegal as it involves hacking third-party computers. So really really do not suggest do this. It's illegal. But I'm just making you aware that some people do do it and what they do is they hack a website and then they can insert content and links on the website. Sometimes the hacks will place content like new pages and outbound links in a way that anyone can see them, so they're easy to spot. If your site's been hacked in this way More pages and outbound links in a way that anyone can see them, so they're easy to spot. If your site's been hacked in this way, more sophisticated hacks will use cloaking. We talked about cloaking in SEO Aids Part 3, yeah, part 3. And they cloak it so that only Googlebot can see the links and the content that's been placed. Now, hacking sites with content is rare. If you suspect it's happened on your site, then you need to use a user agent switcher plugin on your site. Then you need to use a user agent switcher plug-in on your browser, set the user agent to Googlebot and then browse your site and see if any hacked content is displayed to you. But again, this is an illegal technique so I really do not suggest doing it.

Next up, we've got head term. Now head term is a keyword which has a huge amount of volume, but it's usually very broad in terms of intent. So example head terms would be broadband, laptops, history. You know these are named head terms because they're at the head of a graph of search volume and they're at the opposite end of the graph to the long tail queries. And obviously it's hard to explain this graph on a um, on a on a podcast where it's just voice only, but it's a. It's a very famous graph that you'll see, where it shows short head terms have very high volumes of search. And then the curve drops down to long tail where you've got long tail keywords which have very short amounts of search, but there's an awful lot of long tail keywords. So there's a small number of head terms that get lots of traffic. Now they may sound like the thing to chase, but because the intent on head terms is so diffuse and so broad, it's really quite it can be really quite hard to monetize. So example one we ranked number one for years and years and years for the term broadband on googlecouk and we got, you know, daily thousands and thousands of people searching on that search term. It was actually one of the poorest performing in terms of monetization because people had such broad intents. You know they weren't the right ones to necessarily monetize, whereas if we had, um, much longer tail, keywords would often monetize much better, proportionally compared to these very, very broad head terms.

Next we've got header, as in page headers. So the header of your page design is usually the top part of the page and it's usually common across all or most of the pages on your site, and the page header is where you put the main site navigation and links to common features like shopping baskets, user login settings, that kind of thing. Next we've got the header tag. Now, header tag. This relates back to the H1, which we spoke about earlier. Header tags are HTML tags that are used to organise the content of your page and they range in hierarchy from H1, which is the most significant header, to H6 being the least significant. Now H1, I would like I said should just have one really have one h1 per page. All the others you can actually have multiple ones. So if h1 describes the content of your entire page, your h2 will then be um the header for a part of the content of your page.

So if you've got like your pages and in four piece of content is insane, four pieces you might you would have four h2 headers, one for each of the page, parts of the page and within your h2. If that was then broken down into subsequent parts, you would use h3s, and if that h3s were broken down into the subsequent part, you'd use h4s, etc. All the way down to h6, and I find it's very rare to get down to h6. Whenever I've written anything, I will often use H2s and quite often use H3s as well, but I think I can't remember the last time I got down to using H4. But those header tags are there to help sort of block your content up and segment your content nice and neatly. And the more neatly you segment your content, the more of an easy time Google's going to have understanding what's going on in the page.

Next we've got the Helpful Content Update, the HCU. Now the Helpful Content Update is a series of named Google updates. Now the first one was launched on the 25th of August 2022. Now the aim of the Helpful Content Update was to combat what Google might describe as content that was built with the primary purpose of ranking in search engines, which contained mainly summarized versions of information that could be found elsewhere and which do not bring anything new to the topic that they're writing about. The types of sites that have been hit by the HCU updates have included many of what might be described as niche sites, particularly ones that appear to have affiliate or display advertising as their primary monetization route. Now the hc has been a seismic set of updates, similar, in effect, um on some parts of the seo community as the pandram penguin updates were 10 years previously and I've seen lots of people almost literally leave um, the whole site creation, creating content, content business altogether because they got so destroyed by the helpful content update. I mean Touchwood, fortunately, myself, the sites I run have been fine with it in the main and those that have seen an effect. It's not like game over, it's not like an extinction level event for them. But yeah, these helpful content updates have been really, really significant and no one is yet to recover from them that we've seen, although google are making noises that recovery is possible. So we'll see what happens. But I think they're important to put in any kind of glossary because, along with penguin, people still talk about the penguin updates now from there over 12 years ago. I think people will be talking about helpful content update in many years to come because it had such a effect on certain areas of the internet.

Next up, we've got hidden content. Now. Hidden content is any content that isn't visible on the loaded web page at first load. Now, done properly, hidden content isn't an issue and it will get indexed. But done improperly, then it can cause you issues and even penalties. So any content that is hidden must be able to be made viewable by the user in their browser. So this could be by clicking on different tabs to hide or show content as required, or clicking a link to expand out some hidden information to make it viewable. Content hidden but viewable with action is fine and it should all be indexed by Google. No problem If you're trying to include hidden content that will never be viewable by a real person and is only included to try and manipulate rankings, it can be something that could cause you to be penalised. A very old-school way of doing this was years ago. People used to hide keyword stuff content by having the text color and the background color to be the same. Now that's really easy now for the search engines to detect. But if you are including a load of content on the page and there's no way of the user interacting with the page to make that content visible at some point or another will potentially cause you problems. So just make sure everything is can be made viewable by an action of a user on the page.

Next up, we've got hosting. Hosting or web hosting is that any service which provides you with a physical and logical space on a server or servers where your website actually operates. From now, basic hosting service may provide you with some space on a single server shared with multiple other website websites. More complex hosting services for more technically complex websites may have component parts hosted and replicated on multiple devices in multiple data centers worldwide. So yeah, I mean always make sure that your hosting is sufficient to the needs of your website. So, like I say, we've got so many complex sites. Qsp, for example, is on Amazon Web Services and is spread across a number of servers and services of AWS and is replicated worldwide. So it's quite a big, intense setup, whereas I've got other sites that maybe just basic WordPress sites that aren't shared hosting. So you've just got to pick and choose whatever's appropriate. All right.

Next up, we've got hreflang. Now hreflang is a HTML tag that can be used with web pages to define which language and location a web page serves. Now this is especially important for sites that may have multiple variations of a page that serves different locales. So this helps resolve duplicate content issues for very similar but locationally different, as well as indicating which version of a page to serve to a user depending upon their location. So, for example, say you've got a website that targets in English, say, the US, canada, the UK and Australia, so that's four very different countries. So that's four very different countries, and you might be selling a product that is very similar but might have different attributes, like the price might be different, the delivery might be different, depending on which country you're in. So therefore, you can set up location-dependent versions so four different versions of that page, one for each country, and use hreflang to say to Google this version is for this country and this language. And then, obviously, you can do the same. If you've got, um, you know, french language versions for different french language speaking countries, you could have a french canadian version and a french france version, example, and which might be very similar. Apart from, there's some slight differences for the individual countries when it comes to things like pricing and delivery, that kind of thing. So that's where hreflang is important for targeting yeah, targeting the same language but in different locales, when you have mainly content that is duplicate. So it's, yeah, if you consider it's like canonical tags, but it's a canonical tag that gives you that extra ability to go by different countries, basically, and languages.

Next up, we've got htaccessfile. Now, the htaccessfile is a configuration file for the Apache web server, which is the web server that many, many web servers use, and some of the web servers also use htaccessfiles as well, and they allow you to make various configuration changes in these files. It's most commonly used in seo for making changes to url redirects, such as implementing 301 redirects. When pages move from one place to another or you delete a page, you want to 301 the deleted page to a different page on a website. So, yeah, it's a configuration file used by web servers If you don't set up web servers yourself and don't need to get on that level. You don't need to worry about it.

Next, we've got HTML. So HTML stands for hypertext markup language. It is the code that's used to build web pages and which can be interpreted by web browser to construct the web pages. You see it, simple as that. You know if you don't necessarily need to use html nowadays to be able to create websites, you know if you're using wordpress or other cms's and themes, you know, but underlying all those is html code.

Next, we've got http, which stands for hypertext transfer protocol. So if you've ever seen it at the top when you get urls, you might see http up there and it's um. It's the protocol that forms the basis of the world world web as we know it today. It just provides the ability for documents to be linked by hyperlinks, now more commonly just called links, and it was invented at CERN, the big place, the collider, large Hadron Collider, isn't it? In Switzerland and France and around that area? Yeah, so it was created. Well, that was being built by Tim Berners-Lee back in 1989, and it created essentially the World Wide Web that we have today.

Https is just Hypertext Transfer Protocol. Secure. It's just a secure version of HTTP and it secures and encrypts all communications between the server and the browser. Which means, even if your e-drifter intercepts the information in transit, they can't read it. You, the information in transit, they can't read it. You know you should be making all your websites on https. You know google will demote sites which are only http only. It really really wants https. So that's just literally what it stands for.

And finally, for today, we've got hub and spoke. Now, the hub and spoke is a content marketing model designed to help build topical authority. So in this model, you build hub pages which cover a topic at a broad level and link link these hub pages from these hub pages to multiple spoke pages which cover related subtopics in depth and link back to the hub page. And it's it's very similar to the pillar and cluster page model, um, which you may have heard about elsewhere, and, to all intents and purposes, you can pretty much consider them to be the same. So, yeah, that's it for today. So we've gone from h1 to hub and spoke.

If I've missed any h's that you think should be in here, do let me know and I can get them added. And yeah, I hope you're enjoying these. Do let me know what you think and until next time I'll see you later. Before I go, I just wanted to let you know that if you'd like a personal demo of our tools at Keywords People Use that, you can book a free, no obligation one-on-one video call with me where I show you how we can help you level up your content by finding and answering the questions your audience actually have. You can also ask me any SEO questions you have. You just need to go to keywordspeopleusecom slash demo where you can pick a time and date that suits you for us to catch up. Once again. That's keywordspeopleusecom slash demo and you can also find that link in the show notes of today's episode. Hope to chat with you soon.

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