Simple question about H1 tag

H

huryu

Newbie
Mar 30, 2012
6
0
Hey guys! Wish I had known this forum before... I'm new around here, but already learned a lot!
First I'd like to say thank you so much for the information around here! Now that I'm a registered member, I hope I can help someone too :)

So here's my question, sorry if it's too long :x
I have a ~2 years old website (it's a blog) that is well ranked for pretty decent keywords in its niche, just by doing basic SEO... like keywords in bold, meta tags, original content, etc. I got first page for many strong keywords, but no top1.

To be honest I haven't done deep optimization, like improving the source code and using h1-h6 tags (I always knew about them, but was too lazy to edit every post of my website - around 200 posts, with more than 200 words each one). Never done a strong link building too, just natural links, Yahoo Answers and Youtube.
ps: don't get me wrong, this is just one of my websites... I have like 8.

My question is: for all this time, the title of my website was between h1 tags. But my blog title is made of 2 words, and only one of them is related to my niche, but still it's very generic.

Do you think that if I remove the h1 tags from website's title and put the tags around strong keywords INSIDE each of my site's posts would improve its position in Google Search?

I don't plan putting the tags between the title of the posts because this way there would be more than one tag per page, since my index page shows 7 posts. People say it's bad to have more than one h1 tag per page, right?

It would take time to manually edit each post, but do you think it's worth it?
Even if It doesn't help much, my only fear is if that could have a negative impact. Because for the meantime, until I'm done editing each post, some pages will have no h1 tags.

Thank you! And sorry about any english mistakes, it's not my native language! (neither my website's :p)
 
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So you coded your website in straight HTML/PHP? Why didn't you use a CMS?
 
I would put a couple of header tags in, but that is not deep SEO like you think. Start you backlinking if you really want to rank well.
 
huryu said:
So here's my question, sorry if it's too long :x
I have a ~2 years old website (it's a blog) that is well ranked for pretty decent keywords in its niche, just by doing basic SEO... like keywords in bold, meta tags, original content, etc. I got first page for many strong keywords, but no top1.
Click to expand...

I don't think putting keywords in bold is going to help SEO. Google's crawlers do not see "bold". They also do not crawl meta tags. They used to, but not anymore.

Sounds to me like your niche is weak, because hate to say it but, after 2 years you still don't know basic SEO. There's onsite and offsite optimization, and it sounds like you don't know enough about either. As previous poster said, backlinks. Have you ever run a backlink checker on both your site and your competitor's sites? You mentioned laziness in your post, and I'm wondering if that word also applies to the manner in which you learn SEO.
 
macdonjo3 said:
So you coded your website in straight HTML/PHP? Why didn't you use a CMS?
Click to expand...
Thanks for the reply. Actually it's a blogspot blog on my own domain.

3v0|v3 said:
I would put a couple of header tags in, but that is not deep SEO like you think. Start you backlinking if you really want to rank well.
Click to expand...
Hi! Thanks for the reply... I'm sorry, I think that I wasn't clear enough in my original post. By "deep" I wanted to say that I didn't focus enough on that website, because I had better ones to work on. It's a niche that I like and have decent knowledge, so I used to write posts on there and didn't want to make money on it. But now the traffic is getting pretty good (~1k UV per day) and I'm making around $600 per month through local CPA offers (it's much worse than american offers), just letting it there (not updating it frequently).

Nigel Farage said:
I don't think putting keywords in bold is going to help SEO. Google's crawlers do not see "bold". They also do not crawl meta tags. They used to, but not anymore.

Sounds to me like your niche is weak, because hate to say it but, after 2 years you still don't know basic SEO. There's onsite and offsite optimization, and it sounds like you don't know enough about either. As previous poster said, backlinks. Have you ever run a backlink checker on both your site and your competitor's sites? You mentioned laziness in your post, and I'm wondering if that word also applies to the manner in which you learn SEO.
Click to expand...
Hello! Thanks for your reply, helped me a lot! I always thought that bold and meta tags were crucial! Actually my niche is pretty strong, but my content is much better than many competitors (not all), because it's an area that I have good knowledge and content is very well written.

I was lazy only to edit EVERY post of my website, not knowing if it would help in anyway.

But, while I was lazy to do that, I've done a lot of offsite work. Got a Profile that's Top 10 on my site's category on Yahoo Answers, answering every question I could, with quality answers (1800 "best answers") with links to my site. So if I put my link on my answer, people usually will trust me and even buy stuff I recommend.
Also, I have uploaded pretty good videos on youtube, made from scratch, linking to my website too. The only thing I didn't do, until recently, was building artificial backlinks. And also I answer questions on my site's fanpage on Facebook. (which makes people share my content even If I don't ask them to do it)

I'm not lazy when it comes to learning, but I think I got the wrong way. Like I said, I didn't know this forum. All info about SEO that I had before knowing this forum was through local websites, that now I see they were poor quality websites. For example, they would swear to God that bold and meta tags are crucial, and they are authority sites around here, that's why I trusted them! Well, like that old saying "Living and Learning!"

Now, I'm focusing on learning SEO the right way, and will try to improve all my websites with everything I'm learning here, that's why I asked about the H1 Tag. Because I'm afraind my website could get a worst ranking if I do something wrong... the money it makes is pretty good around here (more than average people get on regular jobs).

Thank you!
 
<b> is still very much looked at by search engines
so is natural use of title, h1, h2 <em>
 
Okay then, what about the backlink checker? SEO Spyglass has a free version, MajesticSEO online is good, but only shows a few for free, and ibacklinkpro is also very good, and gives good information for free.

I think I see what your situation is, which is that you are expert in one area that has bearing on SEO, but still weak in other areas, and SEO is an overall composite of everything. So, again, onsite & offsite are two different components, and running backlink checkers and getting familiar with PR, link-juice, link pyramids etc... is a good place to start. I learned most of what I know from looking at competitor's backlink strategies. Every once in a while, I'd run into something that looked REALLY goofy, like it made no sense at all, and then I'd start thinking about it, and asking about it and eventually not only did it make sense, but it was brilliant and I had a new backlinking options.

One way to structure the learning process is to do a comprensive analysis of the #1 and #2 sites for your best keyword, and then ask the questions "What are they doing that I'm not doing?" and "What do they have that I don't have?" Sometimes it's nothing more sophisticated than EMD and domain age, but sometimes it's something REALLY effective, and once you've learned the trick you can apply it to their own site.

Just last night I found a competitor that relies heavily on a particular blog for backlinks. Let's call it a "super blog", meaning a blog that gets WAY more juice from Google than you'd think would be reasonable. Okay so, then let's say that this Super Blog was added on as a "bonus component" by disengaged, high-level administrator types and given to a group of people that lacked either the sophistication, time and/or money to properly administer the blog, and it sits unused and neglected by them. Okay, so then let's hypothesize that my competitor happened upon this empty blog and, given that it wasn't secured or administered, said hypothetical competitor took over the blog and made numerous articles and many backlinks to his site. All well and good, but the last article was over 2 years ago, and last night I find this rich treasure trove of original content and "just anyone" can sign in as an editor to the super blog and change things, like change backlinks that point to one site and instead, point them to another.

Thanks for the gumball, Mickey!

That's the kind of stuff I'm talking about. I got here by running backlink checkers, and then wondering what it was that I was looking at, and why it was doing what it was doing for my competitors.
 
blancog76 said:
<b> is still very much looked at by search engines
so is natural use of title, h1, h2 <em>
Click to expand...

Thanks for the reply. Well, even if <b> doesn't help to improve the website's position in search engines, it's something that I'll keep cause I think it helps the flow of the text. Makes it look better and easier to read, highlighting important parts of the text. I keep keywords in bold but I make it naturally, blending with content.

I'm sorry to ask, but what is "<em>"? Thank you.

Nigel Farage said:
Okay then, what about the backlink checker? SEO Spyglass has a free version, MajesticSEO online is good, but only shows a few for free, and ibacklinkpro is also very good, and gives good information for free.

I think I see what your situation is, which is that you are expert in one area that has bearing on SEO, but still weak in other areas, and SEO is an overall composite of everything. So, again, onsite & offsite are two different components, and running backlink checkers and getting familiar with PR, link-juice, link pyramids etc... is a good place to start. I learned most of what I know from looking at competitor's backlink strategies. Every once in a while, I'd run into something that looked REALLY goofy, like it made no sense at all, and then I'd start thinking about it, and asking about it and eventually not only did it make sense, but it was brilliant and I had a new backlinking options.

One way to structure the learning process is to do a comprensive analysis of the #1 and #2 sites for your best keyword, and then ask the questions "What are they doing that I'm not doing?" and "What do they have that I don't have?" Sometimes it's nothing more sophisticated than EMD and domain age, but sometimes it's something REALLY effective, and once you've learned the trick you can apply it to their own site.

Just last night I found a competitor that relies heavily on a particular blog for backlinks. Let's call it a "super blog", meaning a blog that gets WAY more juice from Google than you'd think would be reasonable. Okay so, then let's say that this Super Blog was added on as a "bonus component" by disengaged, high-level administrator types and given to a group of people that lacked either the sophistication, time and/or money to properly administer the blog, and it sits unused and neglected by them. Okay, so then let's hypothesize that my competitor happened upon this empty blog and, given that it wasn't secured or administered, said hypothetical competitor took over the blog and made numerous articles and many backlinks to his site. All well and good, but the last article was over 2 years ago, and last night I find this rich treasure trove of original content and "just anyone" can sign in as an editor to the super blog and change things, like change backlinks that point to one site and instead, point them to another.

Thanks for the gumball, Mickey!

That's the kind of stuff I'm talking about. I got here by running backlink checkers, and then wondering what it was that I was looking at, and why it was doing what it was doing for my competitors.
Click to expand...

Wow! Thank you for the great reply... always good to learn new stuff. Really helpful.
Well, about backlinks checking, yeah I've done it before. But the thing is, my niche is very big, I don't have specific competitors. I have many competitors for many different keywords. I did try to follow my competitors strategies, and did everything that was acessible to me. But, for example, the top 1 competitor is a very very big site, with an internal forum (something I don't have, since I can't host it), very hard to beat (many people generating content).
So, at the moment I think that the most important thing I can do right now is to make in-site SEO to be perfect! Or at least do everything that I can to improve it. Any suggestions are welcome!
Thank you.
 
huryu said:
Well, about backlinks checking, yeah I've done it before. But the thing is, my niche is very big, I don't have specific competitors. I have many competitors for many different keywords. I did try to follow my competitors strategies, and did everything that was acessible to me. But, for example, the top 1 competitor is a very very big site, with an internal forum (something I don't have, since I can't host it), very hard to beat (many people generating content).
So, at the moment I think that the most important thing I can do right now is to make in-site SEO to be perfect! Or at least do everything that I can to improve it. Any suggestions are welcome!
Thank you.
Click to expand...

Backlinking is an evolutionary process. If you go too fast, you get deindexed or penalized, so I think your priority is backwards. Do backlinking as 1st effort, do onsite SEO 2nd. If you have money, you could purchase backlinks and premade backlinking strategies such as link pyramids, etc... or you can build your own, or both. Again, research "link pyramids" in order to understand how Google determines where & how sites get placed in the search results page.

Another thing is, while your niche may be "very big", Google hands out results on a kw by kw basis. That "bigness" presents opportunity to you as you might find an area of weakness to exploit that your 'big" competitors have overlooked. You should have a list of your kw's prioritized by income generation potential, and where you rank for each of those kw's, and a separate backlink analysis for each and every one of those kw's in order to determine where your focus should go.

You need all that before you even start to do onpage SEO. And you should be building backlinks based on this information before you spend too much time on the SEO.

How many backlinks do you have, and what is their quality?
 
i suggest to always have good onpage seo which does include bold, meta tags and h1 h2 and h3 tags. if doing those steps gives you a lil bit boost in seo then that could mean the difference with ranking 1 or ranking 5.

so the lession is, if it is within your power to do it then it might as well be done. , just in case.
 
Nigel Farage said:
Backlinking is an evolutionary process. If you go too fast, you get deindexed or penalized, so I think your priority is backwards. Do backlinking as 1st effort, do onsite SEO 2nd. If you have money, you could purchase backlinks and premade backlinking strategies such as link pyramids, etc... or you can build your own, or both. Again, research "link pyramids" in order to understand how Google determines where & how sites get placed in the search results page.

Another thing is, while your niche may be "very big", Google hands out results on a kw by kw basis. That "bigness" presents opportunity to you as you might find an area of weakness to exploit that your 'big" competitors have overlooked. You should have a list of your kw's prioritized by income generation potential, and where you rank for each of those kw's, and a separate backlink analysis for each and every one of those kw's in order to determine where your focus should go.

You need all that before you even start to do onpage SEO. And you should be building backlinks based on this information before you spend too much time on the SEO.

How many backlinks do you have, and what is their quality?
Click to expand...

Thanks again, you're helping a lot, very nice information here.
I see what you mean, and yeah, I agree... backlinking is a very important part of SEO process. But my strategy was to build up slowly, while trying to optimize my site the best I could (with the info about in-site SEO that I had / have now). As of an area of weakness, I think I've found many areas. This week I got an alert in "google webmaster tools" telling me that one url was getting a lot of traffic, and for my surprise when I checked that specific keyword from that url, my site was top 1! Just got this alert again haha

here's the message: "Search results clicks for xxxxxx have increased significantly. Yay!"

That happened even without making too MUCH effort to build artificial backlinks... just natural links through my offsite work, and through people who liked my site (not saying it was easy tho... or that I was just sitting there watching things happening).

I Will follow your tip and separate an analysis for every keyword combination... it's something that I haven't done yet, and now I see it's very important and helps to know where to focus on.

According to google webmaster tools, my website has 3000 backlinks. Half of them are from yahoo answers, followed by youtube videos related to my niche and facebook. Then some blogs related to the niche, and the rest of them were build naturally by other people.

Thanks for your help here in my thread, I appreciate that!

trevorhoang said:
i suggest to always have good onpage seo which does include bold, meta tags and h1 h2 and h3 tags. if doing those steps gives you a lil bit boost in seo then that could mean the difference with ranking 1 or ranking 5.

so the lession is, if it is within your power to do it then it might as well be done. , just in case.
Click to expand...

Yeah, this is the kind of thinking that I have too. If you can do something that is very acessible to you at the moment, why don't you do it first?
This is the way I work... and now the results are coming finally! May not be the best or the faster way to do it... but I can tell that RESULTS are starting to appear faster and faster now.
Thanks for the reply!

I like the way this thread is going.
 
3000 is a lot more than I expected, just based on the visual image I had in my mind. I would have been surprised by 300, so I'd like to meter-down the intensity of my comments if you don't mind.
Also note, when I say "onpage SEO", I'm referring to pages created specifically to target specific keywords. You ought to know which of the many kw's you could do onpage SEO for has the best income-earning potential for you. Also be careful of "over-optimizing" your site. Google's algorithm detects pages that have been artificially "packed" with kw's, and will punish a site for doing this. Make sure there is enough kw's on a page, but not too many, and they appear natural.

Another tip I'll throw at you for onpage is that site's filepathnames for images can be optimized for your kw's. Google cannot see images, so the only clue it gets for what the image might be about is by how it is titled and what it's path on your site's directory is.

So, the location & name of a photo of a car muffler in an article about muffler repair could be:

1) w w w.mufflerfaqs.c o m/photos/picture1.jpg

or it could be:

2) w w w.mufflerfaqs.c o m/mufflerphotos/brokenexhaustpipe2.jpg

Which of these two is going to give the best results?

So, for "onsite SEO" going through the site and administratively renaming directory and image file names for optimum results is a good idea.
 
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