~~~Search Engine Optimization~~~
From: Ed Coxe
Hello Jill & Heather,
I've been a subscriber to RankWrite for a few months now, Thanks for
the good work... Question: I know that putting a key phrase in H1
format within the body of a web page can make a difference in the
overall scheme of how well a page is ranked, but if I don't want the
text to be that large, does it make any difference to the spiders and
bots if the text is H1 but is then reduced to a smaller size?
This is what I mean.....
<h1 align="center"><font color="#CCCC99" size="3" face="Verdana">Our
Headline Here</font></h1>
I hope this makes sense....
Thanks,
Edward Coxe
Andyy Barr Productions
http://andyybarr.com
~~~Jill's Response~~~
Hey, Edward,
Yes, header tags can often give your keyphrases a bit of a boost when
used within your pages. They don't even have to be H1, but can also
be H2 and H3. In the old days, when site designs weren't quite so
sophisticated, these large fonts could be used on the page and not
look bad. However, these days, with all the sleek designs out there,
a traditional H1 headline tag often looks really huge and out of
place. This is not aesthetically pleasing to the site visitor,
although the search engine spiders gobble it up!
Your solution is a good one, i.e., simply changing the font size
within the font tag itself. I've used that solution myself on many
sites, and it seems to work fine. I've changed the fonts down to a
size two and the benefit of the header tag still seems to come through
(although it's difficult to measure any single variable in an
optimization campaign). When you use the font size technique with
header tags, you will still end up with a bold heading, and with some
extra space above and below the actual heading text. As long as that
is not a problem for your site, it's a great quick workaround.
However, there's another method of using header tags within your text
for search engine optimization purposes. This method allows you to
specify what your header looks like. It's all done through Cascading
Style Sheets (CSS). CSS allows you to remove the bolding aspect of
the header, along with changing the font size, and even the spacing
above and below the headline. I am definitely not an expert with
CSS, but I do have some friends in high places who are. The Web site
designer of our Rank Write site, Shirley Kaiser, created a nice style
sheet for us that utilizes this technique to a certain extent.
Basically, she simply specified in the style sheet what size each
header tag would be. So now all H1 tags are a 20pt font size, all H2
tags are an 18pt font size, etc. If you know anything about style
sheets, you simply put the code in like this:
H2 {
font-family: Verdana,Geneva,Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;
font-size : 18px;
}
For a ton of resources on how to create and use style sheets, please
visit this page of Shirley's WebSiteTips.com site.
So far, I have not heard of any problems in the search engines when
changing the font sizes of header tags. However, if you're worried
about it and want to go strictly by the book, one way you can use
header tags within your pages and not have them look out of place is
to put your header in a table cell with a background color and use a
fancy or italic font. Very often you can make something that looks
like it's a graphic, when it's really text. For example, go to this site and notice the yellow words,
"Adventure Travel" right under their logo. This is real text that
could be utilizing an H1 tag. (I see they're currently using a font
size of six instead, but for search engine benefits, they could just
as easily change it to an H1 tag.) It's possible that a large font
size such as six will have the same or similar benefits as using the H
tags, but I haven't seen any proof of this. Therefore, I'd recommend
the H tags instead.
Hope this helps!
Jill
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