SEO and Headings

I’m a writer at heart. I’m constantly scribbling idea, sentences and scenes in notebooks. I’ve written thousands of articles in my head that never made it to paper, or through the keyboard. I have a draft folder full of articles that I’m saving until I have a beneficial place to post them. And, yes, I’ve written things that have no home, and never will, out of nothing but love.

So, when it comes to SEO, I have mixed feelings. On the one hand, I completely understand the need for SEO. I do a good job implementing it, especially on paid client work. (I do not do link building, or as it is less charitably called, “begging for links.”) On the other hand, as a writer, I want the world to work such that the best, most informative, most well-written items automatically rise to the top simply on merit.

Even now, after I’ve crafted the post I wanted to write, the way I think it should be written, my SEO plugin demands to know what the target keyword is for this post. Will anyone really ever search for SEO and Headings? If not, I should change it. Oh, and by the way, SEO and Headings doesn’t appear early in the text, or in one of my headings… (and too many of these sentences are too long…)

Sigh.

SEO and Writers

Your average mercenary writer, or those for whom the passion of writing has gone cold, have no trouble contorting a sentence in order to fit in an exact match keyword. I die a little inside every time I have to invert sentence structure and add a bizarre clause setup to shoehorn in that keyword.

I hate alternating between typing ADHD and ADD, and attention deficit disorder and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder on an ADD blog I built in order to be sure there is text that matches what was searched for somewhere in the article. Google promises us that it understands synonyms. It does sometimes, in some places, but are you willing to take that chance?

Did you see how I linked both of those above? Is that necessary for humans?

Nope.

Does Google see those as different keywords?

Yep. There is a difference between synonym words, which Google does well, and acronyms and phrases that mean the same thing.

Is Google Smart About Headings?

Recently a SEO person I generally respect mentioned something that I read and parsed, but never really took in until later. (Unfortunately, now I can’t find who it was, or where it was written. I’ll keep looking so I can link.)

Anyway, the idea was that Google is supposedly now smart enough to eliminate one of my irritations with SEO as a writer: the constant repetition of keywords in headings.

Traditionally, a good SEO writer would structure and article about Roth IRAs like this:

• <h1>Roth IRAs
  • <h2>Roth IRA Banks
    • <h3>Roth IRA Bank CDs
    • <h3>Roth IRA Bank Mutual Funds
    • <h3>Roth IRA Bank Interest Rates

And so on.

There are much worse examples, but of course, those all elude me as I write this.

However, you see the constant repetition of Roth IRA in every header, and then Roth IRA bank. This is thought to be necessary for Google to give you header credit for both searches for “roth ira bank CDs” and the search for “roth ira bank mutual funds.”

According to his theory, Google is smart enough to give credit through the header chain. That is the following would be equivalent to the above.

• <h1>Roth IRAs
  • <h2>Banks
    • <h3>CDs
    • <h3>Mutual Funds
    • <h3>Interest Rates

Of course, we have no way to know if this is true. It would be great if it is. We also don’t know if it is necessary to just contort differently. That is, do I need to make <h2>Bank and not banks to make the following match up properly?

Again, Google isn’t the enemy here. They want the same thing I want: the best match for the user at the top of the search results. It just is really hard to get a computer to do that, especially when there are an army of people at every turn trying to “bribe” their way to the top via clever tricks that the computer likes.