on H1 tags

[jeoffory]

Hi again guys,
Not sure this is the appropriate category to submit this question, but since I basically only optimize for Google and just let other search engines find what they may... I will ask here.

As I am sure everyone has realized H1 tags can be extremely useful for rankings. I know they consider several factors such as text size and bold text... but I like to stick with the H1 H2 H3 format.

My question is: Should I set up my site so that every page is like this :

<H1> "KEYWORDS THAT DESCRIBE MY SITE OVERALL" </H1>
<H2> "KEYWORDS THAT RELATE TO THIS PARTICULAR PAGE" </H2>
<H3> "MORE SPECIFIC KEYWORDS RELATED TO THIS PAGE" </H3>

----- This way my site has a general theme.. with all the H1 tags being almost the same thing. I have read some articles on keeping a theme in your site for rankings.

OR should i set it up something like this.. every page being:

<H1> "KEYWORDS THAT RELATE TO THIS PARTICULAR PAGE" </H1>
<H2> "MORE SPECIFIC KEYWORDS RELATED TO THIS PAGE" </H2>
<H3> "KEYWORDS THAT DESCRIBE MY SITE OVERALL" <H3>

------ This way each page shows a clear emphasis on keywords... but my overall "site theme" seems more erratic.

Anyone know the importance of this Theme issue? Someone once described it something like a search engine takes a picture of ALL your pages at once... considering them as a site as a whole.

Right now I am set up closer to the first example... with a few pages as an exception as sort of test pages. But I don't have a keen enough eye for these things yet.
Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Love and luck
Jeoffory
:cheers:

[Dan0]

Originally posted by jeoffory
Anyone know the importance of this Theme issue? Someone once described it something like a search engine takes a picture of ALL your pages at once... considering them as a site as a whole.

Right now I am set up closer to the first example... with a few pages as an exception as sort of test pages.
Search engines still look at individual pages, not sites. The "theme effect" on Google arises from the use of relevant text in links. So Page A links to Page B, and the text of that link tells Google something about Page B.

Other search engines may consider other factors about Page A, such as the title, headings, other text on the page, etc. Wisenut (runs Looksmart's secondary results) and Teoma (runs Ask Jeeves) both do this.

Excite did as well, but Excite is dead. Altavista started to, but they produce such random results nowadays, who knows what they're doing. FAST seems to look at this stuff too, but a page won't rank on FAST solely based on "off page" factors.

Google is the only search engine that seems willing to rank a page based solely on "off page" factors. Presumably that's because they only use link text to do this. There's no telling if they factor in other stuff somehow, but it seems unlikely.

[qwerty]

Heading tags are part of the structure of your document. They should be set up sort of like
<h1> the main point of the page (which will of course include your kw phrase)
<h2> the heading for a section of the page
<h3> some sub heading within the section

As Dan said, the search engine is interested more in the page than the site. Structure the page properly and the search engine will understand it better.

[bwelford]

From a site visitor point of view, I suggest that your <H1> tag should include something that describes the competitive advantage of the products or services that the website offers.

With the changes in Google over the past months, my own view is that a SERP may well direct a searcher to an internal page. So it is very important that each page in a sense can be a front door to the website. I say more about this in a recent newsletter, Optimize Your Web Site for the New Google! (http://www.strategicmarketingmontreal.ca/newsletter-30.htm).

Barry Welford

[Dan0]

Barry:

As a big fan of "irresponsible speculation" myself, I really enjoyed that article. Your advice to have outsiders review your site is also right on.

[g1smd]

Go to http://validator.w3.org/detailed.html and enter the URL of the page that you want to check.

Tick the boxes for Show Source and Verbose Output and especially for Document Outline and hit the Validate button.

On the results screen, scroll down past the Error List (if there is one) to the section marked Document Outline.

If the results there do not look like a summary of your document then you are abusing the <hx> tags.

[Peter (IMC)]

Jeoffory,

There is a difference between web site optimization and web page optimization. (obviously web page optimization is part of web site optimization)

Header tags should be used mostly for web page optimization. The H1 is bigger than the H2 is bigger than the H3,... etc. Use the bigger one for the over all title, and a smaller one for paragraph specific titles.

Best is to target just 1 keyword phrase per page. This phrase can come back in more than 1 header tag.

Some texts just consist of more than 1 keyword phrase. This is no problem,.. just make them show up in different paragraphs (using the <P> tags) with their own header.

Using the P tags will help a search engine figure out the structure of the text, and together with what is found in the title and meta description tag determine the relevancy of the page in total.

If you put too many keywords in the header tags (like your second example suggests) than relevancy will be spread over all those words and you won't rank high on any of them.

You can read more about this here: Optimize Copy (http://www.seo-works.com/seo-techniques/optimize-copy.html)

Regards,

Peter

[jeoffory]

Thanks for all of your input.

I understand that nature of H1 tags, but I don't think it's fair to say that if you use them in any way other than 1 then you are abusing them. Undoubtedly, with CSS control they do not give visual clues to my users. I think EVERYONE has used CSS to make your h1 tags blend in with your page better.

I think qwerty answered my question with the information I needed. My only concern was that I had read an article on another forum (which i can't find now, of course) which suggested that if your site sells "blue cars and trucks" that your H1 tag on EVERY page should be "Blue Cars and Trucks" and that the topic of that page, lets say "Fast Blue Cars" should be the H2 tag. This way the H1, H2, H3 etc hierarchy is still set up logically, but it is set up across your whole site. ie:
Homepage : H1- Blue Cars and Trucks

Sub page 1 : H2 - Fast Blue Cars
H1 - Blue cars and trucks
H3 - Fast Blue Car 1
H3 - Fast Blue Car 2

Sub page 2: H2 Fast Blue Trucks
H1 Blue cars and trucks
H3 Fast Blue Truck 1

and so forth.
i think i could acheive the same effect they were talking about by leaving off the H1 tag on my sub pages. Am I correct in believing that if there is no H1 tag on a page that the H2 tag will get the same "value" as an H1 tag would?

[ihelpyou]

That is correct.

Also, please note that there is no difference that I can see in a h1 or h2 or h3 tag for the search engines. They carry equal weight in my mind. So whether you use a h1 tag at the top, or a h3 tag, it makes no difference. As long as you keep document structure in mind as that is the purpose of those tags, you will have no problems.

[jeoffory]

Did you really just say that H1 H2 H3 tags have no difference? I am about 95% sure that is incorrect. If you have H1 H2 and H3 in a document the H1 tag will definitely be given more value. i dont think it's something DRASTIC. but it would be misinforming someone to suggest that they can just use H1 2 and 3 in any order regardless of how important the keywords inside the tag are. you should definitely give your overall topic the H1.. or what you would like to place well in results for. the H1 and Title should be the same in my opinion. H2 and H3 may be weighted equally I dunno.

I know that i noticed one time i had a sitemap page and ALL the text on it was H2. not sure how i managed that.. but it was an accident. strangely enough tho... it turned up as a high ranking for almost every keyword string i searched for that was on the page. seemed illogical considering the massive amounts of different keywords that were on the page. but the sitemap page ranked higher than the optimized pages it linked to.

[qwerty]

I think that in the absence of an H1 tag, an H2 will do just as well as the H1 would have. It tells the spider "this is important text," and the spider takes that into account.

I can't say for sure whether H2 is treated the same as H1 when they're both on the page, but my guess would be that the one that comes up first would be the most important from an SEO perspective.

From a document structure perspective, however, it would be a mistake to use an H2 before your H1. But I doubt the search engines would have a problem with it.

[ihelpyou]

No jeffory, I'm saying the h2 and h3 are the same as h1 in the absense of a h1 on the page. There is zero difference that I can see.

In other words:

h2 = top of page
h3 = sub heading
h4 = sub-sub heading

In that instance where there is no h1, the h2 is just dandy.

I find it extremely funny that sites go to extremes to make sure a h1 tag is at the top, whether it's visually displayed as a h1 tag, or it's formatted through the use of css.

There is simply no need to do so imo.

[qwerty]

I use a style sheet to reformat all of my headings, so I don't have any reason to use an H2 instead of an H1 as the top heading level of a document. But I do agree that there's no harm in starting with 2 and working your way down from there.

And of course, I do not reformat those tags to the point where they no longer look like headings.

[Dan0]

I've tested this as recently as a couple months ago. H1, H2, H3 made no difference, at least on Google.

If you read the "Google paper," they refer to anything in a heading the same way. Position in the document matters, the proximity of words (exact phrase matches) matters, but the size of the heading doesn't seem to matter.

[AndyJ]

DanO,

I recently did the same test on Inktomi. Same results, the <Hx> designation is of little consequence and font size does not matter. However, pages with <Hx> tags removed plunged in the serps.

Thanks,

[Dan0]

That's consistent with what I saw on Google. Bold, italic, emphasis, etc. did not mean as much as a heading.

[Webmaster T]

Originally posted by ihelpyou
Also, please note that there is no difference that I can see in a h1 or h2 or h3 tag for the search engines. They carry equal weight in my mind. So whether you use a h1 tag at the top, or a h3 tag, it makes no difference. As long as you keep document structure in mind as that is the purpose of those tags, you will have no problems. Agreed Doug but the value to the SE means zilch they are gravy the most important thing is properly structured documents are more usable by the users of the site. Proper structure in documents also increase scannability, users don't read, they first scan a page looking for clues to relevance to their needs. Once they scan it and see it is what they want then they read it more carefully! Headings enhance the scannability of documents.

So proper document structure using each <H> as Qwerty outlined above is IMO, more important then any weight they may have with SE. Since all are equal on weight and possibly only 1/page is counted why not use them correctly to enhance the user experience?

I do things a little differently then most I use <H1> as a general topic indicating its place in the site, <H2> is a page specific heading which closely reflects the title. <H3> is a heading which indicates the topic of information between it and the next <H3>. <H4> is a subset of <H3>. IMO, this gives the user the ability to figure out exactly what the doc is about and whether they should stop scanning and actually read it. Do I care that my page specific <H2> tag may not be very effective if only 1 is used. No in my experience this hasn't hurt the placement at all. Besides I'm more concerned about the users then how an engine may use the <h1>.