How important is H1?

How importand is H1 now?

If it is how do you make is smaller it takes to much space its HUGE letter?

Why you think it is still important?

 

In IE4-6 "H1" looks ridiculous. I don't know about how "important" it is, it doesn't have affect when it comes to SEO, if that is what you are asking. It has been recommended to use more modern tags to show that you are a recently designed website. I honestly don't know whether using <strong> .vs <bold> really has influence, but many SEO addicts seem to believe it does. Div code is more modern and a little difficult to manipulate when you are not used to it.

I doubt that helps you any, what I just said. But the header tag "H" can go from 1to5 or whatever. 5 is smaller.

 

The <h1> element is VERY important. Of the on-page SEO elements, it is the 2nd most important - 2nd only to the <title> element... You should have a single <h1> on every page. It should target the primary keyword phrase from the <title>.

The <h2> element is the 3rd most important. I use multiple <h2>s to target the primary keyword phrase and if applicable the secondary and tertiary keyword phrases...

<h3> is the 4th most important... all the way to the <h6> which is the 7th most important (although it's difficult to use headers beyond <h1>, <h2> and <h3>). All of the headers carry more weight than the actual content of the page, more than keyword rich URLs, etc.

I always include an <h1> and multiple <h2>s on every page.

As far as the size... And <h1> can appear on your page with any size text. It can be the smallest text on the page. Simply use CSS to set the font size of the <h1>.

 

I read all that, then I read information from people who used to work for Google. Half of that stuff that SEO gurus plant on the Internet is voodoo, it don't even mean a thing. It's just a best-guess scenario. The title tag is always a given, but header tags? I don't know. Especially if all you're gonna do is X them out with CSS. Seems redundant.

You may be right, you may be wrong. Never know. My suggestion is get some REAL content and design your site navigation well. All the rest will be acknowledged with time. I have seen total monstrosities rank higher than sites that people paid to SEO. It's the content and the relevance more than the design and tag configuration. Does tag configuration help? Probably. But it doesn't make or break a page rank.

 

Modifying the font size using CSS is not X'ing out the header... The search engines are not looking through your CSS files to see which words are appearing using which fonts and which font sizes. They could care less about your styling. Do you really think Google cares if you use blue text instead of black or red? or 15pt vs 14pt fonts? That is styling and has nothing to do with the content of the page. The only styling they seem to care about and consider is bolding, but it carries very little weight. If you have a decent web designer, the CSS would never appear in the HTML that is rendered anyway... It would be in an external file.

I can tell you without a doubt the <h1>, <h2>s, and <h3>s have a big impact as far as on-page SEO.

 

I still doubt it, but we can agree to disagree. Fact is, CSS is not even recommended as a standard because so many people use IE6. And I can prove that with my own statistical data from my counter software.

I get way more organics from Search Live than I ever got from Google for what I do. 60% still use IE6 believe it or not. I use CSS, but I have to reform it for stupid IE6. Fortunately, IE8 got it together.

You may be right. Like I said, we will never really know. We don't write the Google algorithms, so we can't possibly say for sure what is important and what is not.

 

0 impact from my own experiments (played with h1's for ages), H1 tags are so 1998. one should not be very smart to figure out that the 2009 google is not stupid enough to give you better rankings just because you did put your targeted keyword between two tags in your body text.

as far as the onpage SEO, i'd say what matters is the quality and quantity of text that you have there, Images and videos are very important nowadays, Clean code (css), meta titles, and the internal links structure and also the nature of your inner pages (are they relevant to the main subject, are they really sub categories ?), other 1998 factors have close to 0 impact now; (that's my own point of view.)

good luck.

 

Although I won't be able to tell how much it will contribute towards seo, somehow it still has importance. When you are talking about seo, basically it is about optimizing to the maximum, so everything counts.

 

If you are looking for definite answer for you question, no one in this world can answer that. (except Google, and don't expect answer from them.)
But if you are looking either Yes or No then its Yes, it does have importance. As H1, H2, H3 tags carries weight more than normal text on website so search engines tent to give extra weight on these tags. People always recommend to put your keyword in these tags, but I would say its good to write for your users and not for SE's. If you think its appropriate to insert your keyword in these tags, fell free to do so.

 

and can you make them small with no CSS?

 

i agree, it's more of a "best practice" and not something set in stone. there are tons of websites in niches i compete with that don't have H1 tags and just use images for their header and they still beat me. main reason being, they were there first and they have excellent content updated almost daily.

 

H1 is ok to use, but the use of this tag cannot make lot of difference. This tag alone cannot bring a site higher in SERPs.

Where you have important headings, use this tag but do not expect any major benefit from it.

 

Having a variety of font sizes for your keyword phrases will give you optimum results in your content!

 

That is a good point.

Though I do use H1 but I even donot see dp use any h1.

 

Why would DP even consider doing that?
And DP got age and lots of links. So its good not to compare with these kinda sites. Just build a good site with great content.

 

DP is a forum, so none of that SEO strategy matters. Search engines eat forums for lunch, they crawl them every damn day, twice a day sometimes!

I see Google bots and other bots on my forum every day almost.

 

h1 is not as important as title. It can be treated equal to the content of the page.

And we can also customize the size in H1 tag.(Using Css or using font tag.)

 

how about if i use h1 tag like this

Did not use CSS, i mean.

that's good or bad for my on-page seo. ??

 

thanks for the discussion; i don't have them and a webmaster in town that i talked to about redesigning my site said they were of little/no importance, but there seems to be quite a discussion as to the value of the H1, 2 3 etc around on the forums and even among the 'experts'.

 

Hi,
H1 is larger fonts use onliy for heading an all .