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-How many words can you safely place in an H1? How may H1s can be on one page/site?
-What are the various meta tags recommended numbers (I've seen several estimates, what's the consensus)?
-When does your page start to get spammy with repeated Alt keywords?
-What's a good Title length?
-etc..
I know all of these topics are covered continually. Is there a good tutorial or thread that breaks down the hard numbers? I know nothing is set in stone. I just find myself pondering these things.
PS-(what the alphabet would look like without Q & R)I have recently been targeted by those lovely SEO cold calls. I loved knowing what I was talking about. Blew his ship out of the water with the questions I asked. Much Love to WW and everybody involved!
Here goes my take:
> How many words can you safely place in an H1? How may H1s can be on one page/site?
Only one H1 per page. Like the TITLE, the H1 is a global description of what your page is about. More than one is pure spam, you may of course get away with it.
> What are the various meta tags recommended numbers
The only meta tag most of us believe is useful is the description, it sometimes is displayed in the SERP. It should be informative to humans, not spammy for search engines. Most of us believe that the meta keywords is safely dead.
> What's a good Title length?
Like the meta description, the TITLE is very prominent on the SERP, it should be human friendly. Most SEs truncate it somewhere between 50 and 70 characters.
For long term success design your site for humans, not for search engines.
My question regarding H1s stems from a site I have that has two columns of different text running down the page. My questions regarding metas stems from a site that has a very broad scope; four main catagories with multiple sub catagories. I've seen the generic recommendations about Title length, etc. What I am curious about is what is the optimal length, maximizing keywords and their effectiveness. If I can leverage 10 keywords just as well as 2, I obviously would. But it seems that the popular consensus is that less is more. I'm curious about these things.
I save the dark side for the hooch under the sink and the grass in the closet.
Only one H1 per page. Like the TITLE, the H1 is a global description of what your page is about. More than one is pure spam, you may of course get away with it.
I am puzzled by this advice. I have been hand coding for nearly 9 years and have many pages that have multiple H1s with lower Hs below them. Quite recently, I checked some pages at one of the validator sites and it ticked me off for using an H4 without having any higher level Hs on that page.
Is there some observed intelligence that multiple H1s on a page are not advisable for SEO?
- Ash
Now this could just be me, I haven't done any split run studies to verify it. Just a cumulative observation of what's working.
The entire set of Hn tags was created with the idea that a page should have a single H1, and then progress by single digits. It's the logic of an outline, with H1 being the overall summary for the page. The W3C considers it an accessibility error to have multiple H1 tags, or to omit a number as you go up (down?) to the other tags.
[edited by: tedster at 7:49 am (utc) on April 13, 2003]
I prefer focused pages. I use the title trick to help me keep the page focused so I have the same keywords in my header tag that I have in my title.
An H1 tag tells people that the following paragraph is the most important paragraph on the page. If you have two H1 tags on the page, which paragraph is the most important one? How is that importance reflected in the title of the page?
If you have 6 H1 tags on the page are all the paragraphs following them equally as important? If they are, wouldn't you be best served by creating entire pages for the phrases you have in H1 tags? If H1 tags were intended to be used several times on a single page why did they bother creating H2 and H3 tags?
The W3C considers it an accessibility error to have multiple H1 tags
Thanks for the feedback. I also have a writing/publishing background and was treating the page title as the main heading and the H1s as the level one tags seen in Word or page layout programs. This is why I thought it was perfectly logical to use multiple H1s.
AT the w3c.org site I cannot find any direct prescription that says there should be only one H1 on a page. The last time it was mentioned was by a working group in 2000 (ER group) but a very recent mailing list archive on that site argues in favour of multiple H1s where appropriate. Others argue strongly to use a fresh page to introduce a new H1, which is fine.
The prescriptions are only about proper nesting.
Even a wider web search for "only one" h1 page shows that the advice is mainly seen at WW but I cannot see widespread use of this advice (as an accessibility thing). Is it something that WW participants have picked up directly from a Google insider?
Don't get me wrong - I do understand the logic that a certain key phrase gets more importance if there is just one H1 (and will gladly observe it for SEO).
- Ash
One of the sites I am putting together at the moment has numerous images. Is it spammy to alt label them all like "Dallas Subscription, Dallas Contact Us, Dallas Email Gang, etc?" I want to key off the city title but, am I getting spammy with the repitition? I know the recommendation of being image related but, what do you think the SE response to such Alt tags would be?
Thanks for the discussion!
