Sunday, February 18, 2007

[ranking and search engines] Headings in Google search results

In the event that someone should come one of my posts by doing a google search, the heading of that google listing appears as the date on which I published that post.

For example, should someone google "sweet sour valentine," a post from my blog will appear in the search results under the heading "Tuesday, February 6, 2007."

Is there a way for me to make a change to my blogger template so that the title or the first sentence of my post appears as the heading?


This Post was written by sarahalisonmiller from Food and Paper.

2 comments:

Jocelyn:McAuliflower said...

Google is looking at the semantic value of your page, and according to your page source code, the first line of your post is in fact your date information.

Reason number two your date displays in the google returns is that you have an h2 tag around your date- which semantically means the date is more important than your page title (which you only give an h3). Remember h2 bigger size display than h3 ... h2 means more important things in that tag than in an h3 tag.

Now do you see how your code is telling google to display the date first?

Fixes:
1) swap the order the text is displayed in your code and post via your template: Display the post title first, then the date line.
2) Change the h tags used in your date-header and post-title class tags. You want:

<h3 class='date-header'>Tuesday blah blah</h3>
and
<h2 class='post-title'>A Sweet and Sour Valentine</h2>

Reading for more information...

Sarah said...

Thanks a whole bunch! I thought it would probably be something simple for someone who knows how to speak computer language.