Importance of h1 & h2 tags?

Your input please!

[ericjunior]

I have a number of sites that don't define h1 & h2 tags in the css - will this have a noticable effecton google placement? How important do you guys rate the impact of optimised h1 & h2?

[heini]

Eric, what do you mean: you have no h1 tags or you have them not styled with css?

Not using header tags is a mistake, as header tags are a perfect place to stress your keywords/phrases. Probably the second most important place following anchor text.

If or not you style header tags with css is of no relevance to SEs.

[ericjunior]

hi heini

I find that when creating a site where the written content is presented in tables, h1 tags are difficult to control as they always palce a space under the text - -this is fine when text follows the header but if the header appears in a single cell with no text to follow we get a nasty, unwanted space underneath.

That being said - if h1 & h2 tags are still relevant i have to find a way around this.

[GrinninGordon]

ericjnr

You can use css files to dictate the size, color, position and probably more attributes of heading tags. And they are important. Also (wink, wink, nudge, nudge) Google seems to like nothing better then having a match between your title and heading tag. Especially if the heading tag is a <h1> and the first thing it finds in the body ;-)

[Gonzalez]

You can specify (increase or decrease) the margins above and bellow the text. On your css file include something like:

=====================================================
h1 {font-family: Tahoma; color:#000000; margin-top:3; margin-bottom:-5}
=====================================================

This will make the top margin 3 pixels bigger than default and bottom margin 5 pixels smaller than default. If you donīt use css, use <style> and </style> between the head tags.

Hope it helps

[deejay]

hi ericjunior

try a display: inline in your H# style:

H3.noline {
display: inline;}

No more nasty line. :)

[edited by: deejay at 9:46 am (utc) on May 2, 2003]

[Skylo]

My site dropped down to second for our keywords. I added h1 and h2 and now we are back on top:)

[ericjunior]

The issue H1 tags create for us occurs with the rendering differencing between browsers. While it is possible to use margin attributes within CSS to remove H1 spacing and apply it in IE, the results in Netscape are nowhere near the same.

What we would end up doing is creating a javascript browser recognition which loads the appropriate style sheet allowing the definition of H1 to suit the page - a lot of work

[jady]

Tested the theory:

Site 1: Used NO H tags has PR5 and is in position 8
Site 2: Used H1/F4 tags has PR4 and in position 3
Site 3: Used H1/F5 tags has PR4 and in position 1 and 2

--------------------

No anchor text used, no external links to these pages. Just 3 folks whom sell the same item and have one content page with same verbiage on it..

[g1smd]

Used <title>, meta description, <h1>, <h2> and <h3>, title attribute on anchors, good link text, and alt attribute on images and got a number one position in about 881 000 sites (on freshbot). Not bad. Waiting for update now.