Importance of Header tags for SEO?

[Believe]

Hey Guys,

I am trying to learn as much as possible regarding SEO, I am new to this industry and have just released my first site. I had a question regarding H2 and H3 tags, I realise they are important but quite often H3 tags make the text ridiculously big for a sub heading in an article.

Is it bad practice, or will google punish a site if it uses H3 but a style to force the font size to be smaller?

Thanks for your input, look forward to meeting and doing business with a few of you.

[Hermski]

Hi Believe

Are you asking, if search engines will punish your site, if you change the size of H3 in the CSS?? Very unlikely, or more like, no...

Style the H1, H2, H3 etc. whichever way you want via CSS. Of course, starting with H1 being the largest and going down from there i.e. 30px, 28px, 26px... H1 being the heading of the article (as an example) and H2's being sub-important headings... H3 have even less importance from what I know, so I rarely use them anyway - maybe they're good for headings in the sidebar navigation.

Does that answer your question? All the best

[Believe]

Yes that makes sense.

I am still trying to learn as much as possible about SEO. Doesn't seem like an easy subject to master.

Appreciate your feedback

[edgarf76]

If you are using wordpress, install Jetpack and you can edit your css that way. The benefit is that every time you update the wordpress version you don't have to re do it. If you want to adjust the size of the headers, you can do it inline like this.

<h4 style="font-family: arial; color: black; font-size: 11px; text-align: center;">Put H4 Text Here</h4>
<h3 style="font-family: arial; color: black; font-size: 12px; text-align: center;">Put H3 Text Here</h3>
<h2 style="font-family: arial; color: black; font-size: 14px; text-align: center;">Put H2 Text Here</h2>
<h1 style="font-family: arial; color: black; font-size: 14px; text-align: center;">Put H1 Text Here</h1>


(Source: @universal4 )

[Rostick]

Nice advice by edgar. You won`t get penalized by doing that

[edgarf76]

I dont think so @rostick. I did some research into it and on most of the seo sites/forums I read they said to be logical and keep it in a logical order. The way I am doing it is starting with the H1 I use 14, as I go down to the h4 I use 11. I haven't had a problem with it, it seems to be a very common practice however the people who have problems with it abuse that technique and take a too far.

[universal4]

Thanks for the reference Edgar,

Bytheway, when you update wordpress it should not overwrite your css, however caution should be used when updating a theme since that will often overwrite the css.

I still prefer editing and custoimizing css manually rather than adding another plugin to do it. Howver, I keep css edits that I made in a second file handy so that if a theme update overwrites those changes I can add them back in easily.

Good discussion and it shows there are many ways to do things, just try and find the method that you feel most comfortable with and do that. Also, you can often get help or guidance here, from those who provide feedback for the method you choose.

Rick
Universal4

[Believe]

I dont think so @rostick. I did some research into it and on most of the seo sites/forums I read they said to be logical and keep it in a logical order. The way I am doing it is starting with the H1 I use 14, as I go down to the h4 I use 11. I haven't had a problem with it, it seems to be a very common practice however the people who have problems with it abuse that technique and take a too far.

H1 being 14px
H2 being 13px
H3 being 12px
H4 being 11px.

Is that what you meant?

Also in what way are people taking advantage of that? What shouldn't I be doing, wouldn't be much fun being penalized by google.

Thanks!

[edgarf76]

Yes, I i mean the size of the text. An exampe of people taking advantage of it would be all of the same size text and using it something like this

<h4 style="font-family: arial; color: black; font-size: 11px; text-align: center;">Introduction</h4>
<h3 style="font-family: arial; color: black; font-size: 11px; text-align: center;">Body 1</h3>
<h2 style="font-family: arial; color: black; font-size: 11px; text-align: center;">Body 2</h2>
<h1 style="font-family: arial; color: black; font-size: 11px; text-align: center;">Conclusion</h1>


The way I use it is like this:

<p style="text-align: center;">Introduction</p>
<h4 style="font-family: arial; color: black; font-size: 11px; text-align: center;">Question such as What is the Benefit of this company</h4>
<p style="text-align: center;">Body 1 - The benefit is ext....</p>
<h3 style="font-family: arial; color: black; font-size: 12px; text-align: center;">Question 2 - Does this company offer bonuses?</h3>
<p style="text-align: center;">Yes This ext...</p>
<h2 style="font-family: arial; color: black; font-size: 14px; text-align: center;">Question 3 - How Do I make deposts</h2>
<p style="text-align: center;">You can make ext....</p>
<h1 style="font-family: arial; color: black; font-size: 14px; text-align: center;">Question 4 - How do I make withdrawal?</h1>
<p style="text-align: center;">You can withdraw monies by ext.....</p>
<p style="text-align: center;">Conclusion</p>
<p style="text-align: center;">Disclaimer</p>

[Believe]

I see.

Wouldn't it be smarted to make H1 14px and H2 13px though? Rather than the same size? Aren't you taking advantage of H1 by giving it the same size as h2 tag?

[edgarf76]

yes, i meant to write it is descending order

[Believe]

OK, Thank you. That has cleared that up for me. Only 500 more questions to ask

[universal4]

Well you have had 1 so far, so your balance left is 499 so you will have to prioritize them.

Rick
Universal4

[edgarf76]

keep asking away @believe. That is the way I have learned. When you start to learn and see people with questions that you can answer, help them out. This is a friendly forum.

[Believe]

ok, you asked for it!

Is it possible to get on the first page of google from only good content and frequent updates without buying links?

[edgarf76]

ok, you asked for it!

Is it possible to get on the first page of google from only good content and frequent updates without buying links?

There are some people on here that say all the backlinks you need is 1 and they rank well. I am not sure if they are on the first page for their key phrase but I do not doubt it. I have gotten to page two for a long tail keyphrase before algo changes. That is the best I have gotten to, so I personally do not know what it takes to rank on page 1 in the first 1-3 results.

I use the rank tracking feature in market samuri to study/research the sites that are my competition. The big pattern I have noticed is awesome content plus a network of what looks like the sites owners own link network. What I mean specifically is a dozen buffer/satelite sites (I am discussing this on another thread on here in the SEO section if you want to look for it, it is under the penguin 2).

A person can set up their own network or link to other people, check out the link section. To answer you question with a yes or no answer, it is yes, I would love to hear what other people who have more experience than I do have to say about that.

[medlington]

Regarding H tags and sizes for SEO, whatever size you have them makes no difference what so ever. Google doesnt read the size of it anyway it just knows that H1 is the main title, H2 the sub titles etc. So someone making all the headings the same size is just making more work for themselves and achieving nothing.

The text in the H tags should contain the same keywords that you declared in the headers and also match with parts of the page description

You should only ever have 1 H1 tag on each page

You shouldnt style things inline, this is very bad practice. in the CSS simply put:

h1 {font-size:12px}

if you style inline like suggested it will make editing the page infuture an absolute nightmare as you'll have to find every heading in the site rather than one quick CSS edit. Also it just adds more worthless code to the site which dilutes the keywords and takes longer to load (although probably not noticeable to you and me)

[davidjames]

Well really some person provided good details about the tag here.

[nameeta26]

Hi,
There are a lot factor to use of Importance of Header tags for SEO? Because Google always preferred Title Meta tag on SERPs Pages. So I think in every post article or any web pages must be a title tag or heading tag.

[Souper]

Hi,
There are a lot factor to use of Importance of Header tags for SEO? Because Google always preferred Title Meta tag on SERPs Pages. So I think in every post article or any web pages must be a title tag or heading tag.

I don't think that's what he has asked. Title tag is a must and a heading tags just supplement the page.