Is H1 tag still effective?

[alexandrahan]

Will H1 tag still effective if I use CSS to change H1 content font size and color(but not try to hide it), will this be all right? Will this be punished?

[DaveN]

I'll put my hand up and say GOOGLE is completely fine about using CSS to adjust the size and colour of the <h1>.

Dave

unless you make it the same colour as the background and repeat it 1000 times on the page, they don't like that apparently ;)

dave

[mipapage]

I'll put my hand up and say GOOGLE is completely fine about using CSS to adjust the size and colour of the <h1>.

Agreed.

And yes, still working for me.

[ga_ga]

I've been using <h1> once at the top, toned down a little with CSS, on several index pages for the past 6 months odd, & I haven't seen any disasters so I for one am fairly confident that it's safe, from a qualitative assessment.

[peewhy]

Experient with your H1 without going over the top, be mindful that Google isn't a good test bed at the moment.

Await the fat lady's song, try a couple of pages with varying H1 tags and monitor your results.

What works for others, may not work for you ...shifting sands and all that.

[mikeH]

peewhy, I will be using just one h1 tag on every page, using an external css file to alter the size to about that of a normal h2 tag. Do you see any problems with that?

[steveb]

Suppose you put a single <h1>Site Title</h1> tag at the bottom of a page, like as a closing title. Is that bad in some way?

[g1smd]

Use the heading tags only on text that really is a heading.

Run the code through [validator.w3.org...] but make sure you tick the boxes for "Show Source" and "Verbose Output", but especially tick the box for "Show Outline" as well.

On the results page, scroll down through the error list (if there is one) and look for the section marked "Document Outline". If the list there does not look like a summary of your document then you are abusing the tag.

[vincevincevince]

like as a closing title

i'm not quite sure what a closing title is. the purpose of the <h1> is to give the main title of the page. in my sites it is the same as the <title> - although my main keywords are appended to the <title> as well.

[pageoneresults]

I sometimes wonder why some have this fixation on <h> tags. It is one of many areas that SEs take into consideration when weighing the relevancy of a page.

Suppose you put a single <h1>Site Title</h1> tag at the bottom of a page, like as a closing title. Is that bad in some way?

My personal opinion? Yes, having an <h1> sitting at the bottom of a page is bad design. We've had many topics surrounding the use of <h> tags. If an <h> tag is not followed by some logical copy, then it is pretty much useless in my opinion. It is a heading! Headings are normally followed by content. Slapping <h> tags into your copy in no logical order or sense of things is not good design practice.

Please, read what the W3C have to say about the use of headings. You'll find that all the questions that have popped up in this thread can easily be answered by following the specifications for their use. Trying to use them in a way to increase relevancy on a page without understanding how they should be used is defeating their purpose.

As a side note, using CSS to style your <h> tags is recommended. Using CSS to style them in ways that is against the specification is not recommended and may cause problems. For example, stuffing keywords into an <h> tag at the bottom of the page with a very small font size may cause problems. Not from an automated perspective, but from a manual review perspective.

But! What if Google or other SEs start to parse CSS files and can filter for unusual styling of <h> tags? Then the automated perspective comes into play. Googlebot has pulled CSS files in the past and will probably do so again in the near future.

Don't use CSS to hide or try and fool the indexing spiders!

[SEOtop10]

As I know it-

- The hn tags help. They have decreasing order of importance (H1 is the best).

- Do remember that keyword density in Hn tags is what matters. So if you put the whole page in H1 tag, it becomes as good as normal.

- It is not necessary to duplicate the title in the H1 tag (element?) The title shows on the SERP, so make it keyword rich and also so attractive that the searcher will click on it in preference to the others. Make the heading so attractive that the viewer feels like reading more of the page.

- Make both title and heading the smallest possible but include the keyword. The best choice will be just the keyword (or phrase) but does it look very attractive?

- It is OK to reduce the visible size of the H1 tag by using the FONT declaration or CSS. You will definitely need to do it because the default display size of H1 tag is too large.

- You should liberally use H2 to H6 tags with secondary keywords of the page in them. It helps your ranking, more so it helps the visitor to skim through the page.

[g1smd]

... but you should only use the heading tags around items that actually are headings.

[peewhy]

peewhy, I will be using just one h1 tag on every page, using an external css file to alter the size to about that of a normal h2 tag. Do you see any problems with that?

I don't see any problem, equally I don't see a great SEO advantage ... I may be wrong:)

I assume the titles are different on each page and the H1 and title are the same?

[mikeH]

yeah exactly peewhy

[DaveN]

from a non seo view point and design point only

what is the diffenece between having a css which
says

.heading_1
{
font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;
font-size: 12pt;
font-style: normal;
color: Black;
}

or

.H1
}
font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;
font-size: 12pt;
font-style: normal;
color: Black;
}

Dave

[waterboss]

>>But! What if Google or other SEs start to parse CSS >>files and can filter for unusual styling of <h> tags? >>Then the automated perspective comes into play. >>Googlebot has pulled CSS files in the past and will >>probably do so again in the near future.
*************************************************

Can't you easily prevent that by just dissallowing that CSS file in the robots.txt?

[pageoneresults]

Can't you easily prevent that by just dissallowing that CSS file in the robots.txt?

Yup! Just as you can stop Google from caching your pages. In both instances, it may raise a flag for manual review.

I used to Disallow my /css/ directory up until about 3 months ago. I saw too many discussions arising suggesting that you not Disallow CSS. So, I'm going to follow the advice I deem relevant from members here at the board and not do anything that may cause a flag (radar blip) on any automated filtering.