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Promotion Tip:
Too Many Headers Spoil Your Rank
by Larisa Thomason,
Senior Web Analyst,
NetMechanic, Inc.
If one H1 tag helps your search engine rank, then 10 H1 tags should give you ten times the boost, right? Wrong. Header tags are a great way to define your document's structure and emphasize keyword phrases, but don't get carried away. You could be diluting the importance of your header text instead of stressing it.
The Importance Of Header Text
By headers, we mean this family of HTML tags:
They define a Web page's structure much like an outline displays the structure of a term paper or technical document. Because these are structural tags, they're important to both Web site accessibility and search engine promotion.
Our May 2001 Webmaster Tip discussed how to define document structure using header tags. It has continued to be a popular story and we get many questions and suggestions from readers about how to use headers more effectively for site promotion.
Unfortunately, some of the suggestions, while creative, may actually hurt site promotion instead of helping it!
One Title Per Page, Please!
The most commonly-asked question is the one in the beginning of this article:
"If one H1 tag helps my search engine rank, should I use several of them on each page to increase my rank even more?"
The answer to that is an emphatic NO - for two reasons:
- H1 defines the page title. A page should only have one title. If you need more than one H1 tag on your page, it's time to create a new page. Search engine algorithms assume text contained in an H1 tag is the page title and describes the page content. When you use several H1 tags, you're diluting the value of the keywords in those tags.
- H1 tags add a lot of space! The default browser display for H1 tags is big, really big. Several large H1 tags push your other content farther down the page. Human visitors may get tired of scrolling as they try to find the content they're looking for.
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Cheating With CSS
Of course, alert readers who remember our Webmaster Tip on Creating Custom Headers will be quick to point out that it's really easy to use style sheets to control the size and spacing of header tags.
In most cases, that's a great technique and we recommend it without reservation. Some designers tend to shun header tags because "all that ugly space" breaks the page layout. Using CSS, they can still include these important structural tags without sacrificing page design.
But any great idea can also be used for bad purposes and this is no exception!
Suppose you decide to use CSS to hide header tags inside page content by styling them to look like regular text content. Like this:
| Learn more about <h1 class="textSize">search engine optimization</h1> in our newsletter! |
Here, you've created a class named "textSize" and styled it to look just like regular page content. Then, you nested an H1 tag inside the paragraph and applied the class to text content containing the keyword phrase "search engine optimization."
Your goal is to increase your relevancy score on that keyword phrase by including it in important header tags. Although you get points for creativity, this is a bad strategy!
- Possible spam penalties. This technique dilutes the value of the header text and confuses search engines and screen readers. It's also an attempt to spam search engines and could get you penalized or even ejected from some engines. They're all cracking down on spam.
- Nesting errors. A header tag is a "block level" tag, which means the browser automatically places spaces above and below it. A header tag nested inside a paragraph tag isn't valid HTML and HTML Toolbox would flag it as an error.
- Browser display problems. You have to change the CSS display property from block to inline to make this trick display properly. However, some browsers may not display the header as an inline tag. Learn more about the display property and browser problems in our Webmaster Tip "Building Blocks With CSS.
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Shady techniques may give you a temporary boost, but may eventually get you permanently banned from some engines.
More Leeway With Other Tags
Because header tags outline the document, having more than one H2, H3, or other tag won't cause as much of a problem. Think of H2 tags as Roman numerals in an outline and H3 tags are the capital letters. Like this:
- This is an H2 tag
- This is an H3 tag
- This is an H3 tag
- This is an H3 tag
- This is an H2 tag
- This is an H3 tag
- This is an H3 tag
- This is an H3 tag
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It's fine to use several H2, H3, and other header tags up to a point, but a large number of subsections usually indicates a fairly long page. Visitors may get tired of scrolling and search engine spiders may get tired of indexing content! NetMechanic's HTML Toolbox contains a load time check feature that calculates total page download time. Use it to identify large, slow-loading pages that can frustrate visitors.
Consider dividing a large page into two or more smaller ones. That decreases page download time and gives you more opportunities to target the smaller pages to particular keywords. A large page with 12 targeted keyword phrases is less effective than 3 pages that each target 4 different phrases. NetMechanic's Search Engine Power Pack tool will scan your pages and alert you if you've used your keywords too little - or too often.
Although it's tempting to try and trick search engines using header tags, don't do it. They do help with site promotion, but that's not their primary use. Header tags' specific purpose is to define page structure. Too-aggressive search engine optimization defeats that purpose and may actually hurt rather than help your search engine rank.
Don't take the chance!
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