SEO advice
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- johnnnnyh
Client has got an SEO consultant on board. They have suggested covering the home page with h1 tagged keywords which don't even make a sentence so "Holidays" "Booking" "Self Catering" that kind of thing!
I suggested a compromise which was making this an actual readable sentence like "We offer self catering holidays. Please see our booking page". SEO guy says the changes I've made won't make any difference to Google/SEO ?!?!? Did I miss something or do SEO'd sites need to just be a nonsense of key word information? I thought the idea was to have quality content on websites.
Anyone have any real knowledge/experience working with SEO people?
- Mimio2
Are multiple h1's even beneficial? May be the opposite.
- Dancer1
I was told that you should only have a single h1 tagged sentence/title per page.
This is a call for trooperbill
- JazX0
You are going to see better results having keywords as HREF's than using multiple H1's.
- bulletfactory0
Nonsense keywords might be considered black-hat SEO and be punished, esp. if the keywords have little to do with the actual content on the page.
I'm no expert, but the H1 elements would bepage title, and part of the information hierarchy of the page H2 or 3's would be more well suited for paragraph/section titles - are these hidden from view?
There is a QBN member who's well-versed in SEO - He might have advice. I'll see if I can find that thread.- yes - trooperbill has a thread on SEObulletfactory
- Wow, I thought that name was a joke.CyBrain
- Stugoo0
ONLY ONE H1 per page.
<h1> is the TITLE OF THE PAGE
this riles me no end- you can have more but you need a reason for segmenting the page that way.trooperbill
- < indeed.fugged
- johnnnnyh0
Well I thought the same - one h1, then h2s, h3s in some logical heirachy. Of course SEO guys site has lots of h1s with the word SEO in and he seems to do OK for a google on SEO?
I hate it when too many "experts" get involved. SEO guy has called up marketing guy friend now!!
- i bet neither of them know a damn thing. 'marketing guy' that term makes me laugh.bulletfactory
- Dancer0
Also screen readers will be screaming at you all day!
- Stugoo0
heres your seo link
http://www.qbn.com/topics/592445…
- Dancer0
from another board which seems quite a sensible response
"Very little in SEO is confirmed, so none of what follows is scientific, but it does make sense that there might be a negative effect. As Beth says, a well-designed page probably only has one top concept, so should have only one H1. If you think you have two top-level headers, you might in fact have two pages. Use header tags in a way that is conceptually clean. If you want bigger font for text that is not a top-level heading semantically, use a font tag."
- johnnnnyh0
My compromise, which I thought was correct. Was just the one, H1 sentence which at least read as heading and included SEO guys recommended key words. After that I've added in the h2s and h3s with a few more key words. I thought I'd done it correctly. As I say, SEO guy's sure that my work will have "no effect on Google".
- sensibly named links and linkback/trackbacks are going to be where your ranking go up.bulletfactory
- that's a better approach, but is anyone linking to you?JazX
- good point - making sure the content is king is best - cross linking yourself to start. Other's hopefully followbulletfactory
- JazX0
You are barking up a tree that is all f*cked up.
It's been my experience that anyone calling themselves an SEO expert is full of sh*t. SEO is much more of an art, than a science. Things might work for you, but 60% of it is referral ranking. It doesn't hurt to have HREF'd keywords or keyword combinations and the correct tags in place.
Google consistently changes their algorithm. Perhaps to convolute things, in order to get users to buy PPC adverts in their AdWords mechanism.
You get about .5 of a second with Googlebot. Caffeine just go introduced, http://mashable.com/2009/08/10/g…. But in your case, I'm unsure it matters.
- +1bulletfactory
- :)JazX
- This is a great response. Thanks, JazX.duckofrubber
- lol ive been doing seo for 11 years now and theres still stuff i dont know.trooperbill
- johnnnnyh0
"Very little in SEO is confirmed" - i like that!
but an awful lot of people are claiming and making money from this unconfirmed advice. Hey, that's fine - just don't like being told my input is worthless when in fact I feel as though I've probably been more "correct" than SEO guy.- you probably are, there are major phoney bolognies out there.JazX
- blaw0
What good is it to have a potential customer find your site, only to be presented with a bunch of random words.
SEO at the cost of effective promotion? Sounds pretty stupid to me.
- johnnnnyh0
So in the sense that page mark-up is not really going to have an instant effect on the page rank I suppose SEO guy is correct. Problem for me was that his first advice was to add in all these h1 tagged text changes. When I cleaned them up into real sentences he decided their value was diminished somewhat in the eyes of Google.
Back to explaining to the client that SEO may be a black hole where he is throwing his money.
- 1 real h1 sentence NOT multiple h1s by the way!johnnnnyh
- Stugoo0
here.
whats the name of this seo company... lets see... if we google them and they are not number one then they shouldn't be talkingor is there name something stupid and obscure?
- ukit0
The keywords matter because Google needs to figure out what to rank you for. Once you have the right keywords in place it is all down to link juice and other factors (90% of the work).
A site that just has keywords won't get you anywhere, as obviously anyone could do that in ten minutes.
- Stugoo0
keywords, good meta data, fresh content, people linking to you and an accessible website is what you need.
not a bunch of H1's
- trooperbill0
@johnnnnyh H1 tags are great for semantics, but you should only use one ona page.As for their SEO impact its pretty low (not what it used to be - check SEOMoz for some info at SES this year where it was discussed and dismissed as a major ranking factor) so i suggest that yes you should have your site semantically correct, but its about 2% important. if you want a free review of their work ill be glad to look at it and give you my feedback.
- boobs0
Why not look at the code of highly ranked sites, and see what they do? That's one way to go about it.
I had also heard that Google didn't even use meta keywords any more, so there was no need to bother to include those.
- i wouldnt as many are simply a result of link love not good seo.trooperbill
- Google stopped using meta keywords YEARS ago. Yahoo/Bing/etc still use em.dMullins
- version30
quite simply:
1. valid code and 2. well written comprehensive informative content for search engines to spider