Search Engine Optimization: improving your web profile

This book's primary concern is to show you how to publish on GitBook as quickly, easily, and repeatably as possible. Sometimes it's also important for people to be able to find your masterpiece on the Web as easily as possible. That's called search engine optimization, or SEO. If you're already familiar with SEO you will find this section dull and unoriginal. Feel free to skip it.

How SEO works

To simplify somewhat, the best way to optimize your content for search is to organize it well, stick to one topic per page, link generously to other sites as well as your own, and use descriptive filenames in GitBook.

One main topic per page using H1

Each of your articles in GitBook (corresponding to an .md file) gets turned into an HTML page. The first thing on the page should be an H1. Normally it should be the only H1 on that page. The rest of the page should be H2 or lower.

# Your first and only level 1 header 

The above H1 header gets translated 
to an HTML <h1> tag. By keeping the 
number of <h1> tags low, you improve 
the chances of being found. It indicates 
highly focused, and therefore, 
more helpful topic.

Explanatory text follows, then:

## Second-level headers,

More explanatory text, and other non-level 1 headers.

### This structure is not required

But it improves search visibility on the Web.

Further reading

SEO is a big topic. If you want to learn more, read The Beginners Guide to SEO from Moz, then optionally download Google's Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide [PDF].