H1 – H4 tags useless for SEO!
By: John Elder posted in SEO
Hello good people!
Yesterday (10/22/09) SEOMOZ.org came out with a massive glut of some pretty exciting and priceless data garnered from their Linkscape web index, their own index of over 40 billion web sites.
I studied economics at one of the better private colleges in the U.S. which means I’ve got a fairly overblown self-important ego, uh, I mean a good background in charts and graphs and statistics…but the sheer volume that seoMoz released yesterday made my head spin just a little.
Granted, I haven’t done a single thing with my economics degree and I had to sit for a minute and re-remember what standard errors, correlations, box plots, scatter plots, regression analysis, and perfectly fit lines really mean (NO I DID NOT GET MY ADVANCED STATISTICS TEXTBOOK OUT TO CHECK…ok, yes I did, but I only looked up a couple of things, really!). So I’m not going to go over the data here.
I do want to discuss one of their findings though.
They found that H1 tags (and H2-H4 actually) probably don’t add much in terms of ranking your site at the search engines. They might add a tiny little bit….might….but probably not.
It’s been sort of standard practice to put your main page keyword inside an H tag for many years. But this fairly convincing research suggests that you don’t need to bother anymore.
Best practices suggest that you keep doing it….because it *might* help a little, and doesn’t seem to hurt. But if you think that stuffing keywords inside H tags is a good way to dramatically boost your rankings, think again.
Some other takeaway points from the data suggest that subdomains are a mostly useless place to stuff keywords, while root domains are a good place to use them, and paths and file names appear to be a slightly good place to use them.
The data also suggests that using keywords in image alt tags is still a pretty good idea, but using keywords in bold throughout the body of your page does not add anything to your ranking.
If you want to pour through the charts and graphs yourself (you know you want to!) you can check it out here.
The guys go on to suggest that SEO often gets knocked for being made up of hunches and hints, that no one really knows what works and what doesn’t. That’s why having this concrete data is so important. The next time one of your clients suggests something stupid, whip out this report and show them the data to prove your theory.
So what do you think about this new data? Comment below:
-John Elder
The Marketing Fool!
