How to use the H1 for SEO

[cryoffalcon]

Hi,
I have heard that in SEO h1 receives more importance than other items like <a> or p or anything So I am trying to use h1 in a situation but I am not quite sure that will it be considered as standard and will google account for it in the same as an ordinary h1 tag.

Let me explain by an example for better understanding, I have something like this <li class="selected"><a href="#">All</a></li>
now what I think is legal is this to put h1 first and then use a tag so it will be like this <h1><a>All</a><h1> but the problem is that if I use this then my jquery thing stops working as it wants the a tag first.
So what I did is this <a><h1>All</h1></a> as you can see in this I used a first and h1 as second tag, so what do you think is it according to the standards and most important will GOOGLE look at it as a LINK or as a H1 tag?

[jscheuer1]

"All" as text won't get you much SEO no matter where it is on a page. It's too common of a word.

H1 works as SEO because the SE spider gives more weight to the text in an H1, seeing it (like it does with all text on a page) as keywords, but more important than keywords outside an H1, more indicative of what the page is all about. I don't think it gives any extra weight to the links in the H1 tag. I think it crawls all links on a page equally, applying the standard SE logic to how important they are and if they're to be followed at all as a result of where they lead to.

And yes, having an H1 inside an a tag is invalid HTML. If your javascript requires invalid HTML in order to work, it needs to be updated or at least tweaked.

And if the H1 is inside the a tag, there's even less chance it will influence the SE treatment of the link.

[cryoffalcon]

"All" as text won't get you much SEO no matter where it is on a page. It's too common of a word.

H1 works as SEO because the SE spider gives more weight to the text in an H1, seeing it (like it does with all text on a page) as keywords, but more important than keywords outside an H1, more indicative of what the page is all about. I don't think it gives any extra weight to the links in the H1 tag. I think it crawls all links on a page equally, applying the standard SE logic to how important they are and if they're to be followed at all as a result of where they lead to.

And yes, having an H1 inside an a tag is invalid HTML. If your javascript requires invalid HTML in order to work, it needs to be updated or at least tweaked.

And if the H1 is inside the a tag, there's even less chance it will influence the SE treatment of the link.

thanks alot for your reply it is do worthy and I will keep that in mind.

[ApacheTech]

The header tags <h1-6></h1-6> are given more weight because they are headers, not body text. They should be used to give an outline to the page, with the main header as <h1>, subtitles as <h2> and so forth.

This is how a screen reader will read the page. The header tags will separate the page into sections, so when a blind user tells the reader to skip a section, it will look for the next header on the page. This is why it's a good idea to use header tags to create a well rounded outline for each page.

Do not abuse the header tags. Their main purpose is to separate the text within them from the rest of the body text, to make it stand out to users and to screen readers. I don't know exactly how robots interpret them but abuse and overuse will result in a poorer SEO "score" than otherwise.

[bernie1227]

I'm pretty sure there was a thread all about this kind of thing a couple of weeks ago:
http://www.dynamicdrive.com/forums/s...ad.php?t=69163
(SEO questions seem to be very popular)
Bernie

[jscheuer1]

The header tags <h1-6></h1-6> are given more weight because they are headers, not body text. They should be used to give an outline to the page, with the main header as <h1>, subtitles as <h2> and so forth.

This is how a screen reader will read the page. The header tags . . .

Accurate, but for the purposes of the original question, eventually a digression into accessibility issues.

This is not to say any of what ApacheTech says here should be ignored, rather to focus on how it relates to SEO. Yes, if the page is well organized, with important and relatively distinctive information in H1, 2, 3, etc. tags, as headers, like would be used in an outline:



In HTML, the two Title lines would be H1 tags. The Subject lines would be H2, the Items, H3, the descriptions Div or P.

If one organizes like that, SE's will easily see what the page is about and will tend to rank it more favorably in searches involving those topics. Traffic and cross linking to the site are probably more important though.

See:

https://www.google.com/search?client...hannel=suggest

for more information on what constitutes an outline in this regard.