I had an interesting occurance happen and it makes me wonder. As most of you know I build a lot of Joomla sites. I spent a lot of time building a very simple siteframe/template so that webcrawlers could easily read it. Joomla has different settings for its templates. Under one setting it uses h3 tags for titles of module , for the three other it does not. I had great SERPS in all three search engines for one of my sites. I was like, ooh this is good maybe i will buy a template that looks better than mine since I have absolutely no eye for design, just usability. I didn't notice, since I was impressed by the beauty of the template but there setting were without H3 tags in the modules. My SERPs plummeted and never regained. I had another site using my template but decided to use a hack that changed ALL my article titles to h1 tags. Boom drop. Maybe Google saw it as an overload. So I am thinking H1 for site name or site message/motto h2 for section/category names h3 for module titles h4 articles titles? or is this too low on the h scheme for article titles?
In my experience header tags are very important, and should definitely be used. However, I would not agree with your selections, I would use your primary keyword phrase in H1 as close as possible to the start. Then use, other keyword phrases, or related words (LSI) in the other header tags. Make sure you only use one <h1> you can get marked down for using more than one. This is likely the cause of your drop in rankings. There does not seem to be a penalty for using more than one of the other tags. It goes without saying (although I am now saying it!) that the contents of the header tags should be very readable to a human, and not just keyword stuffing. With a bit of thinking it's possible to come up with something that works for search engines and humans. It should be possible to use the structure you have outlined so long as your using your primary keyword phrases in there as well. Cheers Tim Buchalka
do you think article titles should be h1 or h2 or should the site name and purpose be h1 and article be h2?
The search engines generally view the tags in order of importance e.g. h1 = the most important. If your site name has your keyword phrases in it, put that in h1, if your article title has your keyword phrase in it, put that in h1. Essentially put in h1 what you are trying to get to rank highly in the search engines, and the less important phrases and other information in the other header tags. Mix it up a bit though, and make it look natural, otherwise if it's too obvious you have keywords in all your header tags you may get marked down for it. Make sure you use a decent title tag as well and remember to balance the use of keyword phrases with human readability. Cheers Tim Buchalka
i have a pr 6 joomla made web site and i'm using h2 tags for the article titles. you can try the same. i'm getting good results
not to hijack your thread, but what file/hack do I need to make the article titles in joomla wrapped with H1/H2? As for my take on it: Your article title should be your page's primary keyword and should be H1 or at least H2. I doubt they would have some unlisted order of the H's should be under, otherwise the SE's would publish how they would prefer it.
i use joomla too. i give the article title on my article page no special heading, but when u click to read the whole article, i have the article title as h1 and the author as h2.
I wrote about how to hack joomla for h1 tags at www.shareyourexpertise.com look at mnymkr profile and you will see it i was thinking I would use h2 or h1 for my article titles do you also h2 the links>?
I use my articles title for the title metatag aswell so I would then make the title of the article a h1. It will be very big so I then use CSS to resize it appropriately.
Well what do ya'll think about this (especially the Joomla peeps) I am building a new template , well site frame actually, because I have no eye for design, The html would be in the order div #1 --- header ---- Css logo with h1 tags around site name (also building a module that can change this depending on the section or category you are in) div#2 --- content if modules are published there will be a row of <h3> tags for module headers. if no module are publised here then you would have an h2article title tag. div#3 --- right or left column (this will hold mostly module meaning h3 tabs however i am structuring the template so no matter if you have left or right published it will appear after the content in the html div#4---- horizontal menu, this will actually appear in a browser after the header division but appear last in the source code what do yall think?
Use header tags only if needed. Excessive use can be viewed as span by SEs. btw, i have been using h2 tags for some sites for some time and the results have been good.