All You Need to Know About SEO

Neither. The H1 should be the page title, with H2s being major section headings. Use an image for the site title.

 

Dan if you use an image as H1 tag then how will you name this H1 tag""" I thought it had to be content??? hows this done"""

 

You don't stick an image inside a H1 heading. Or any other heading. It's that simple.

 

Aaron, what do your quote signs stand for? I notice you use them a lot in your sentences. Do they mean something?

 

See, you and I differ on this one because to me the H1 is like the upper left corner of a novel - where the book title is. It's one website, all pages should have the SAME H1...

But then, I rarely have the 'page title' on each page, and if I do it's an active state on the menu.

EITHER way there should only be ONE h1 on the page, because headers should fan out like a tree, with the H1 being the trunk.

 

This is exactly how the header tags should be used.

 

I here using h1 more then twice really works well especially with key word your trying to target

 

I Like to use just one h1 and then I can have more than one h2 tag. I have been able to get good rankings from this strategy.

 

In which case you're not only wasting valuable SEO real estate (unless you really want your site name to rank #1 in the SERPS for searches on that site's name, which in most cases will happen naturally with or without it), but also are literally wasting an HTML element as well for no good reason.

Besides, on most Web sites the logo is usually an image anyway, so why bother wasting an H1 heading, an empty SPAN and CSS on slapping an image on there when just using the IMG element along with appropriate ALT text makes more sense anyway?

Not only that, would it make sense to waste a H1 heading on something that's not going to change anyway except between site redesigns? (Another reason why I use the H1 heading for the page title - it does change.)

Well, just between you and me, the way I see your sites, you do - it's just not obvious to you.

Exactly. Which brings me to my next point.

Don't abuse the specification. Ever. I'm an HTML purist and a semantic nazi. I will jump down the throat of anyone who knowingly abuses the specification in order to game the search engines. Honest mistakes I'll accept since I've "been there, done that" as has deathshadow. But not a deliberate attempt to manipulate a search engine algorithm at the expense of the people who are using the sites you make.

 

Most often an image used instead of text - with search engines not even seeing attributes 99% of the time - INCLUDING alt, real text is preferable.

Besides to me, it's a HEADER. If the section is a header, shouldn't it use a HEADER TAG? That's just common sense.

See, I say why waste a class on something that is the same on every page, and is present on every page, and of which there should only be ONE on every page.

Take a news page - if I have a news section as my content, and a recent links and media in my sidebar, with headers on all of them - those are SIBLINGS. It makes no sense to downgrade those side ones to H3's or lower because they are KIN off the tree of the document. If I use an H1 for the news title, it means I need to use H1's on those side items - WHY? Because if they are the first header to appear AFTER the H1 and I make them H2's... that would make them CHILDREN of the h1 - which they obviously are NOT.

Too often I see that, people making the first header on a page a H1, then a completely unrelated header below that a H2, then the header below that a H3 when NONE of them are children of the category the previous header is for. If it's a new section, it should be the SAME priority as the section before it, not lower since lower - to my mind at least - means 'child of'.

MIND YOU, I've only changed my thinking on this since I sat down six months ago and put serious thought into my document structures and COMPLETELY finished my switch from design first to content first.

Which INVARIABLY bites the people who do it in the tuchas. Search engines catch on, devalue sites that abuses the system, and you hear the sleazeballs with garbage no content sites that are little more than advertising linkwhores screaming from the rooftops - when fact is they had it coming and should have been fully aware they had it coming, because as Dan put it, they were gaming the system.

Like the recent bruhaha about google devaluing pagerank. People abused it, it really had little to do with the actual WORTH of the page to USERS, so it got slapped down. GOOD!

 

Sweet write-up and clean explanation. You had me interested the entire time.

 

deathshadow thats very good news Im looking at this error right know"" I agree the text work better in the H1 tags then in jpgs the bots love it"" it works for me as a seo tactic"

 

thanx for the incredible work you have done in writing this post

 

Dan, I have a question about the template we should use. Which is better : put the sidebar first or the content first? When I read the page source, I see some web sites have either but do have good traffics. ( i see this from its stat)

 

Content before sidebars. Though I don't do it for SEO purposes - I do it to save mobile users money.

 

Very good read thanks

 

A "nuts and bolts" summary of SEO. Very useful. thank you.

 

so you mean name the jpg H1??

 

No, just use a DIV and put the image inside that.

<div id="header">
	<img src="#" width="#" height="#" alt="#" title="">
</div>

Code (markup):

Just make sure you replace # with the information that's supposed to be in there.

 

See, this is where Dan and I differ - though we are on the same page on MOST of this stuff - we REALLY disagree here.

Your logo image is presentational - it most of the time represents the name of the site, and as such is the topmost header of every page of the document. Now if you're 'logo' is just some goofy picture, then using IMG might be appropriate, but usually a logo is a stylized version of the site or company name - A Name? That's TEXT and should BE text. An image of text is NOT text, it is presentation instead of text.

As such:

1) It's presentational - presentational images belong in the CSS, NOT as an image tag.

2) It's the HEADER of the page, so it should be a H1

3) The image represents or contains text, so there should be text inside the H1 tag, and I'm not talking the oft ignored by search engine ALT text. (remember, most attributes mean jack to search engines, even ALT)

So...

<h1>
  Site Name
  <span></span>
</h1>

Code (markup):

Is my approach... the span having the image assigned to it as a background, and then positioned over the text to hide it... glider-levin style, though my span is after so if I decide to actually use the text with another technique like sliding doors, collapsing doors, eight corners under one roof, etc, etc... I have to make no code changes. To me just using an image tag is inappropriate in 99.99% of cases.

Of course, if there is styling on the text inside a logo I will throw in Bold, Italic, strong, underline and sometimes a break in order to apply styling to make the text as close to the appearance of the logo as possible - so images off the site looks much the same as it does images on, instead of being stuck with crappy looking alt text.

MY way or Dan's way or even your own way - just keep in mind that you should only have a single H1, and your headers should fan out like a tree... If you go down in header priority, the section that is a header OF had best be a child of the header before it - if it is not, then you should NOT be going down a priority.

Which is actually where Dan's logic on this fails.

Oh, and honestly, unless there are other presentational elements being applied to that image, wasting a DIV around it is just that, a waste. If I WERE to use an image, I'd dump the image in straight (assuming there's already a containing DIV around the whole page) and slap the class on it directly.