Forum Moderators: phranque
How is that meant?
A 'good' site will be useful, e.g. as a source of information on a particular topic. Search engines try to display search results relevant to the search phrase. While there is no 'silver bullet', there are some basic things you can do to make your site more relevant (to both visitors and search engines).
The headers you'll want to investigate more closely are the <content> and <keywords> headers. Having the information in these match the content of the rest of the page is better than not having these headers, or stuffing irrelevant content into them.
How about variations, for example.
Letter, letters, door, doors.
<h1>Cars</h1>
Text about cars...
<h2>Ford</h2>
Text about ford cars...
<h3>Taurus</h3>
Text about ford taurus...
The idea is that by placing the text into a header tag you let the search engine algos know that the words in there are important to your page because these are presumably section headings. This is a part of basic 'on page' SEO...
Headings reflect the document structure much in the same way you'd do an outline. These are just good document structure and does affect search engines and how they digest content. If you have one tpic per page - <h1>my topic</h1> <p> content </p> is fine. The <h2>... etc. are good if the topic has subsections.
Headers, on the other hand, are the introductory tags in a document that include (but are not limited to) the DOCTYPE and other non-visible content (except for the title tag) between the <head> and </head> of the document. These provide data to both the spiders and the browser:
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd">
.....
<head>
<title>Yes, search engines read this for sure!</title>
<meta name="description" content="This is a unique description of what is on this page.">
<meta name="keywords" content="use,of,this,meta,tag,is,one,of,great,debate">
</head>
There are more. It's greatly believed that because the meta tags were so abused in the early days they are now ignored (100 instances of a single word would pump the site higher in results.)
But I'm not so sure. I have recently encountered a site or two that is all graphics - almost no text on the page -
but the description found in Google was a word for word match of the hidden description meta tag.
Rule of thumb: use them but make sure the words in your keyword list are actually in the page. Disproportionate use of words in the keyword list versus what's on the page may affect ranking.
If anything will help, it's UNIQUENESS of these tags. Don't use the same title and meta tags on all pages. Make each of them unique and truly descriptive of what's on the page.
Or don't use them at all. :-) I've also seen sites that are doing very well and rely only on good content. If you have good content, you don't need meta tags.
as rocknbil suggested headers are something else altogether and generally set by the server they include status codes, date last modified and so on.
However, as far as I know, the header is actually something that isn't even on the HTML page and isn't at tag ... i.e. if you write a perl script you have to add the line
print "Content-type: text/html\n\n";The DTD line isn't a header, it's the document type declaration.
The title, etc are head elements.
Errr... for a clearer summary see:
The Global Structure of an HTML Document (w3.org) [w3.org]
Outline:
1. Introduction to the structure of an HTML document
2. HTML version information
3. The HTML element
4. The document head
1. The HEAD element
2. The TITLE element
3. The title attribute
4. Meta data
* Specifying meta data
* The META element
* Meta data profiles
5. The document body
1. The BODY element
2. Element identifiers: the id and class attributes
3. Block-level and inline elements
4. Grouping elements: the DIV and SPAN elements
5. Headings: The H1, H2, H3, H4, H5, H6 elements
6. The ADDRESS element
In any case the DTD, the document head, the header, and the heading tags are all important for SEO and for users imo :)
HTTP headers are something else entirely, I decided not to confuse the situation further by bringing them up, especially since most of those are out of the control of the designer or SEO person.
