Was wondering whether or not it kills the SEO worthiness of a header tag if you define it as a class and then have multiple classes in your style sheet rather than just referencing it as a stand alone H1?
yes definitely. <H1>, <H2> and perhaps even <H3> tags are known to be given more weight in terms of keyword density checks and targeting.....
appreciate the responses! just wanted to verify that I was clear in my question. so you're all saying it's much better to use <H1> rather than <H1 class="red">, etc?
oh, if that's your question, then i think it still works. As long as u use H1, H2, etc and not like <div> or something like that to define the characters....
right, so I was thinking of having different H1 classes defined so that I can choose from a variety so that it fits the page layout/color scheme well for various pages through out my site.
{and not like <div> or something like that to define the characters} wat are u trying to say here. For example : <div id="leftnav"> <h1>my keyword</h1> and i hav define h1 for above div as 'leftnav h1"..will not be effective?
try this link different scores given to seo-techniques http://www.seomoz.org/article/search-ranking-factors#f33
of course there is no difference. As long as you tag the identifier <h1>, SE will treat the words within as more impt. Doesn't matter whether u paint it pink, green or luminious yellow....
So what you are saying is that crawlers are not CSS ready!? Because it sounds so if H tags add more weight and using DIV styles don't!
dude, u shld understand what we are talking abt before commenting. We are talking abt SEO and SE are known to give various weightage to words tagged with different tags like <H1>, generally known as the main header of the page. This is generally recognized as what the whole page is about and that is why SE gives the words within more weight and so will rank that page higher with respect to these words. Sigh.....
From my personal experience - using style sheets and div tags to reduce the size of H1 will not reduce the importance of H1 tags by a single bit. Think logically, why should it ? :roll:
As everyone has said: it doesn't make a bit of difference for the search engines which of those you do. From a coding perspective though it does make a big difference. I'd never call a class 'red'. I do have headings within <div class="top"> or something - and then the styling is done accordingly. But to call a class by way of its looks just doesn't make sense, IMO.
More weight is given to the keywords that appear within H1 and so on. H1 Tag: The 1st heading on your page: Website Optimisation Tips and Advise This should be followed by a short paragraph using variations of the target keywords and at all times making good grammatical sense, thinking of the potential reader first and the search engines second.