<H1> headers.

Hello,


I read in SEO guides that for onpage SEO, the <h1> header is kinda important. But what if you site consists of nested tables, with logo stuff and such on top, is the effect the same when placing the header in a table like for example:

<table>
<tr><td>
<table>
<tr><td><h1>header goes here</h1></td></tr>
</table>
</td></tr>
</table>

And what about the color and size of the header when using CSS classes for headers, if you change these values is the header value worth less for the google spider?

 

You can change the header format through CSS as much as you want. SPiders don't mind

 

Search engines have no problem crawling and indexing code in nested tables. Just dont go over the top with it.

 

So i can make a <h1> header with font-size 8px ?

 

Yes you can define properties such as h1 using css.

Something like:

H1 {
	FONT-SIZE: 8px;
}

Code (markup):

 

Oh and while talking about spiders... They "prefer" using <div> instead <table> + your site will work faster

 

Spiders don't care if it's a div, table, or 100 nested tables... Browers will, or course, load divs faster though.

As for h1 tags, you can style them however you want but they're not there for keyword stuffing. I'd recommend making sure they're at least 2px larger than the normal page text.

 

Well i have no idea how i could manage to arrange anything with <div>'s
I mean, those tables are nested up to 7 levels deep, how can you create something like that with <div>'s ? You have a tutorial or something that explains making complex layouts with div's ?

 

Abbot - PM me and I'll give you a rundown of some CSS/DIVS. My website is www.interceptdesigns.net - if you want consultation on this, we can provide it.

But before money is involved, PM me and let's see what you can do on your own.

 

<div> or table, the difference comes in the size of the document. The size gets increased if you use table as it used more tags. The same can be accomplished using DIV's and good CSS.

Search engine crawlers tend to like documents which they can crawl faster ..

 

When the SE crawler comes to your site it first searches for the header tag as that is the important factor for crawling the content and making the spider to identify the where is the content placed all across the website, and through headers (H1, H2....) It can easily identify the content placed on the site. Therefore Header Tags are very important for any seo site.

 

<h1> tags are huge. For many of our SEO clients that did not have them before, just implementing them can cause a huge jump in the serps for those ranked between 50-100. Use them and change their look using css so they don't look stupid. However if you're going to manipulate their look using css, make sure you hide the css file using a robots.txt file.

 

Why do you suggest hiding the css file?

 

I dont think hiding css from crawler is necessary. Using header tag along with css for proper font height is allowed if you dont make some black hat things like too small font size / font color matching with background.

 

Google does not ignore css. It is smart enough to determine the color/size of each word on your webpage. They need this to avoid misuse of keywords (like when you put a bunch of repeating keywords on you page and make them same color as background, i.e. invisible to user). Google will know that for sure. So it is better when everything looks natural, like header font size is larger than paragraph font, etc.

 

I've read that using header tags is a low priority SEO technique. Some people say that using Header Tags are irrelevant to SEO and other say that they are extremely important for page weight and ranking. What is the definitive answer?

I currently have <H1> tags on my forum, which you can see an example thread here:

http://www.calibersrt4.net/forums/showthread.php?t=96

I don't know how to use CSS to well. How can I customize the <H1> tag using CSS? Currently the header box looks really crappy in IE, and decently well in Firefox. I don't like how the header hugs the top of the box and then has a huge space under it while viewing in IE. In Firefox, there's an equal amount of space above and below the header tag.

Thanks

 

check this search ranking factors page for some info, H1 tags are rated at 1.92 out of 5 by various SEO authorities. However this is highly disputed. You can scroll down to the section on that for comments by various people.

http://www.seomoz.org/articles/search-ranking-factors.php

h1{color: #6097BF;
	font-family: Arial;
	font-size: 14pt;
	text-decoration: none;
}

Code (markup):