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I read somewhere that using h1 h2 h3 properly on the page helps with Search Engine Optimization. How is that? Can somebody tell me the proper use of these or other tags or point me to some resource where i can get an understanding of it.
These indicate not only the size of the heading but also the importance.
The main headline will need an "h1" code to give it the greatest importance.
The main sub-headings, which are numbers one, two, and so on in the article outline deserve an "h2" showing they are next in line when it comes to importance.
The "h3" can be given to sub-headings under the main sub-headings such as "a,b,c" points in the article outline above.
SEO and Heading Tags
When the importance of a heading is established with HTML tags, you're actually making it easy for the search engine robots to determine what your web page is all about. The search engine doesn't have to guess at it. It can see exactly what your main topic is and place you under the appropriate keywords so your potential customers will be able to find you on the WWW.
Well there are dozens of factors which help you optimize your website or web-pages. Heading tags (h1, h2...) are just one of them, so if you truly want to optimize your web-pages, please make sure that web-page must comply with the below best & valuable ranking factors.
Unique Title relevant to the content of web-page
Snippets description which describe whole details in short of
webpage
Unique & proper formatted content
Heading tag (H1) with the most relevant keyword to the webpage, try
to place in upper portion of the page
Bold content which is more relevant & valuable within content
Well optimize Images Footer links
Recommend related content
Firstly, SEO is a fairly unknowable subject - it's a continuous arms race between the search engines and the spam kings. There's a lot of folklore, a lot of hearsay, and a things change all the time.
Having said that, Google do give general advice - http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=35769&hl=en.
By writing standards-compliant, semantic HTML, you make it easier for the search engine to interpret your content. This, in turn, allows it to decide if your content is relevant to a given search query. By saying "this is a heading" (i.e. using the h1 tag), you give Google a hint about the words in that tag - in this case, that it's probably the subject of the content.
The best resource on standards-compliant HMTL is the might Zeldman book - http://www.zeldman.com/dwws/.
SEO is mainly focussed on keywords in the document. The main priority is the title of the page. Then it is going to the heading tags (h1,h2,h3). Then the rest of the content (Google said they are not using meta tags, but it is better to have it also).
Using H1, H2, H3 etc in Webpage is giving preferences to the contents. Contents in H1 tags is more important than H2 tags like we do while preparing our documentation.
Also you can visit
http://www.debojyotipal.com/h1-h2-h3-tags-for-seo/
http://groups.google.com/a/googleproductforums.com/forum/#!category-topic/webmasters/crawling-indexing--ranking/5OROBdtsmPs
which will provide more insights.
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So I am now learning html, and I was just wondering why tags such as cite even exist. When I open a website as a user, I still see the text as italic when the code is written as cite.
I found that the tags are useful when it comes to screen readers, so basically for users that have problems with their vision.
Are there any more reasons for these tags? Thank you so much in advance!
Tags are small snippets of HTML coding that tell engines how to properly “read” your content. In fact, you can vastly improve search engine visibility by adding SEO tags in HTML.
When a search engine’s crawler comes across your content, it takes a look at the HTML tags of the site. This information helps engines like Google determine what your content is about and how to categorize the material.
Some of them also improve how visitors view your content in those search engines. And this is in addition to how social media uses content tags to show your articles.
In the end, it’s HTML tags for SEO that will affect how your website performs on the Internet. Without these tags, you’re far less likely to really connect with an audience.
About cite tag: The tag defines the title of a creative work (e.g. a book, a poem, a song, a movie, a painting, a sculpture, etc.). Note: A person's name is not the title of a work. The text in the element usually renders in italic.
Regarding the cite tag, according to MDN:
The HTML element is used to describe a reference to a cited
creative work, and must include the title of that work. The reference
may be in an abbreviated form according to context-appropriate
conventions related to citation metadata.
This enables you to manage all the css applied to quotes easily, were that to be your use case (if you happened to have a lot of quotes on a site). The italics you have observed are part of that css, or rather the default css applied by the browser.
In the broader spectrum
Oftentimes you will run into tags that as of today are not in use anymore. There's different industry standards for different time periods.
All of the tags exist, because there was a reason for web browsers to have a specific way of reading a piece of content.
For example centering a div used to be an almost legendary task that was achievable using multiple methods, all of which had different advantages and disadvantages. However, nowdays it's customary to use the flexbox.
Bottom line is its a way for web browsers and search engines to read and interpret the content you're providing
Tags such as and are used for text decoration nothing else you can also change text fonts and styles by using CSS.
We have inherited a website which we are currently trying to make WCAG2.0 AA compliant
One of the pages is failing the heading-order rule as it has an <h3> and <h4> tags but no prior <h1> or <h2>
We are in the process of adding an <h1> tag (as all pages should have one) but there is no need for an <h2> tag and to amend the <h3> and <h4> would involve a large refactoring of various jQuery code and CSS
Are there any tricks to make the page accessible? I'm loathed to put a hidden <h2> tag in as the screen readers would presumably pick this up. Or do they ignore the hidden tags and the page then becomes compliant?
Are you trying to satisfy WCAG 2.0 AA or are you trying to make the page accessible?
These are usually the same, but sometimes not.
A hidden <h2> would pass WCAG depending on how you hide it. That, however, would not make the page more accessible.
While this may suck, the best, most correct approach is to fix the <h3>s and <h4>s to become correct levels (that is my answer, the rest of this is fluff). Your question might be more appropriate if you instead provide some code samples and ask for tips on how to write a regex or otherwise script these replacements throughout the inherited system.
If you are being told you have no time to do it right, then code examples (or a sample site) might still be helpful to get some guidance.
I really have seen this situation before, and actually have fallen into this trap myself. By applying styles to the h3 and h4, it is possible to make a page look, well, a certain way.
Looking at the point of the header tags however, it is their purpose to add semantics to the document, as we all well know. Is it, therefore, meaningful to have a document outline where there is an h3 but no h2? Screenreaders and other accessibility tools use this header information and some could get confused.
My most influential decision-making point is, "how will the user consume this information?" Will they be able to consume it? Is it meaningful to skip a header level? I initially think not, but please let me know of your differing opinion!
If you really do care about accessibility, giving an empty h2 (even implicitly which is the case when you omit it) might give no clue, in some screen readers, of the announced section to users when they will navigate the outline of the document (1).
That being said, I can't find anywhere (neither WCAG or HTML5 documentation) where it's said that you can't omit one level of headings.
The only official (for HTML5.1) requirement is to use "headings of lower rank" to start new subsections, which should mean that you could use a h3 directly below a h1 but can't use another h1
Even the WCAG is giving an example using omitted ranks saying this example does not intend to prescribe the level for a particular section.
(1) HTML5.1 provides an outline algorithm where we can read about "implied headings" or about the use of the rank when there is an heading content element
I would say the best way to ensure compliance is to refactor the code that is in the javascript/CSS. To hide elements you could use the hidden attribute or aria-hidden.
https://www.paciellogroup.com/blog/2012/05/html5-accessibility-chops-hidden-and-aria-hidden/
I'm following the CodeSchool foundation course now with HTML. Its saying its 'not OK' to not have a <h2> heading as the top one:
we removed the h1 tag and replaced it with an img tag. That's fine, but it also means that our highest level heading right now is an h2 tag, which isn't OK.
Is this going to affect the final product or is it just a design thing?
Nothing will break if there is a h2 and no h1. However, the way computers read websites, is by parsing the HTML. The only way the computer knows that something is a top-level header (h1) is by finding the h1 tag.
The most common reason I can think of at the moment, as to why you want h1 insted of h2, is how search engines index your website. Using a h1, means that the text within the tag is highly relevant to your website, while h2 is not as important (but still more important than h3 for example).
So it's not about what works and don't works, but it's about what things should be. Writing a website, following all the "rules" of HTML, will make it easily parsable by crawlers (programs that parse websites and gather information).
Another, important, reason why your html should be well-structured is for blind people. They use programs that read out text from websites to "read" the website. Having bad semantic/bad structured html might make these programs useless.
Edit:
Sorry, as mentioned, document outline would break, but the website would still be rendered, which is what I was referring to.
The heading elements are used to provide semantic meaning to your content (as most HTML elements do). In addition, people who use assistive technologies, such as screen readers, rely on certain HTML elements to provide information as to how to navigate a page. The heading elements (h1...h6) help to create the page's Document Outline, for which there is a defined specification.
If you were to start with an h2, the outline would be broken.
Just as it makes no sense to stat a report on section 2, you should not start a web page there for the same reason.
SEO
Search Engine Optimalization! If a person searches for, say, "Rubik's Cubes", a search engine will look through their data to see which sites have the string "Rubik's Cubes" (or some substring or related words) on their site.
Now, if your site has the string "Rubik's Cubes" in an <h1> tag, the search engine will understand that this is the entire point of your page, and rank it higher, because it's the title of the entire page!
Meanwhile, if you have it in an <h2> it's probably just some part of the page, and that's fine too, but not AS good.
So while structurally, it makes no difference, think of SEO when you choose which header you use. If you're picking them just based on size, that's a bad idea. Just style them bigger/smaller instead!
In term of SEO, if I want to group relevant page content together to maximize search engine readability, should I use the tag <nav> or <article>?
1) It's not there yet.
2) If it was, and you were wrapping menus as article, or wrapping affiliate link-farms as article, Google would slap you (keep that in mind in three or four years).
3) If you have lots of legitimate content, and each piece of content is self-contained (ie: suitable for article), then not only should you wrap it in an article tag, but you should also learn how to use Google's "Rich Snippet Tool", which was recently renamed "Structured Data Tool".
If you learn how to mark things up, both in an html5-friendly way, and in a Google-friendly microformat, then GoogleBot will grab all of the content it knows how, and it will be displayed in search results and elsewhere, when relevant.
Like I said... ...that's if you've got content which is worthy of doing this, because otherwise, Google will slap you, eventually, if you try to use it for evil.
article tag:-
The tag allows to mark separate entries in an online publication, such as a blog or a magazine. It is expected that when articles are marked with the tag, this will make the HTML code cleaner because it will reduce the need to use tags. Also, probably search engines will put more weight on the text inside the tag as compared to the contents on the other parts of the page.
nav tag:-Navigation is one of the important factors for SEO and everything that eases navigation is welcome. The new tag can be used to identify a collection of links to other pages.
so both tag have their own functionality which can be implemented according to need.
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I have my blog (you can see it if you want, from my profile), and it's fresh, as well as google robots parsing results are.
The results were alarming to me. Apparently the most common 2 words on my site are "rss" and "feed", because I use text for links like "Comments RSS", "Post Feed", etc. These 2 words will be present in every post, while other words will be more rare.
Is there a way to make these links disappear from Google's parsing? I don't want technical links getting indexed. I only want content, titles, descriptions to get indexed. I am looking for something other than replacing this text with images.
I found some old discussions on Google, back from 2007 (I think in 3 years many things could have changed, hopefully this too)
This question is not about robots.txt and how to make Google ignore pages. It is about making it ignore small parts of the page, or transforming the parts in such a way that it will be seen by humans and invisible to robots.
There is a simple way to tell google to not index parts of your documents, that is using googleon and googleoff:
<p>This is normal (X)HTML content that will be indexed by Google.</p>
<!--googleoff: index-->
<p>This (X)HTML content will NOT be indexed by Google.</p>
<!--googleon: index-->
In this example, the second paragraph will not be indexed by Google. Notice the “index” parameter, which may be set to any of the following:
index — content surrounded by “googleoff: index” will not be indexed
by Google
anchor — anchor text for any links within a “googleoff: anchor” area
will not be associated with the target page
snippet — content surrounded by “googleoff: snippet” will not be used
to create snippets for search results
all — content surrounded by “googleoff: all” are treated with all
source
Google ignores HTML tags which have data-nosnippet:
<p>
This text can be included in a snippet
<span data-nosnippet>and this part would not be shown</span>.
</p>
Source: Special tags that Google understands - Inline directives
I work on a site with top-3 google ranking for thousands of school names in the US, and we do a lot of work to protect our SEO. There are 3 main things you could do (which are all probably a waste of time, keep reading):
Move the stuff you want to downplay to the bottom of your HTML and use CSS and/or to place it where you want readers to see it. This won't hide it from crawlers, but they'll value it lower.
Replace those links with images (you say you don't want to do that, but don't explain why not)
Serve a different page to crawlers, with those links stripped. There's nothing black hat about this, as long as the content is fundamentally the same as a browser sees. Search engines will ding you if you serve up a page that's significantly different from what users see, but if you stripped RSS links from the version of the page crawlers index, you would not have a problem.
That said, crawlers are smart, and you're not the only site filled with permalink and rss links. They care about context, and look for terms and phrases in your headings and body text. They know how to determine that your blog is about technology and not RSS. I highly doubt those links have any negative effect on your SEO. What problem are you actually trying to solve?
If you want to build SEO, figure out what value you provide to readers and write about that. Say interesting things that will lead others to link to your blog, and crawlers will understand that you're an information source that people value. Think more about what your readers see and understand, and less about what you think a crawler sees.
Firstly think about the issue. If Google think "RSS" is the main keyword that may suggest the rest of your content is a bit shallow and needs expanding. Perhaps this should be the focus of your attention.If the rest of your content is rich I wouldn't worry about the issue as a search engine should know what the page is about from title and headings. Just make sure RSS etc is not in a heading or bold or strong tag.
Secondly as you rightly mention, you probably don't want use images as they are not assessable to screen readers without alt text and if they have alt text or supporting text then you add the keyword back in. However aria live may help you get around this issue, but I'm not an expert on accessibility.
Options:
Use JavaScript to write that bit of content (maybe ajax it in after load). Search engines like Google can execute JavaScript but I would guess it wont value any JS written content very highly.
Re-word the content or remove duplicates of it, one prominent RSS feed link may be better than several smaller ones dotted around the page.
Use the css content attribute with pseudo :before or :after to add your content. I'm not sure if bots will index words in content attributes in CSS and know that contents value in relation to each page but it seems unlikely. Putting words like RSS in the CSS basically says it's a style thing not an HTML thing, therefore even if engines to index it they wont add much/any value to it. For example, the HTML and CSS could be:
.add-text:after { content:'View my RSS feed'; }
Note the above will not work in older versions of IE, so you may need some IE version comments if you care about that.
"googleon" and "googleoff" are only supported by the Google Search Appliance (when you host your own search results, usually for your own internal website).
They are not supported by Google's web-search at all. So please refrain from doing that and I think that should not be marked as a correct answer as this might create ambiguity.
Now, to get Google to exclude part of a page, you will need to place that content in a separate file, such as excluded.html, and use an iframe to display that content in the host page.
The iframe tag grabs content from another file and inserts it into the host page. I think there is no other available method so far.
The only control that you have over the indexing robots, is the robots.txt file. See this documentation, linked by Google on their page explaining the usage of the file.
You basically can prohibit certain links and URL's but not necessarily keywords.
Other than black-hat server-side methods, there is nothing you can do. You may want to look at why you have those words so often and remove some of them from the site.
It used to be that you could use JS to "hide" things from googlebot, but you can't now that it parses JS. ( http://www.webmasterworld.com/google/4159807.htm )
Google crawler are smart but someone that program them are smartest. Human always sees what is sensible in the page, they will spend time on blog that have some nice content and most rare and unique.
It is all about common sense, how people visit your blog and how much time they spend. Google measure the search result in the same way. Your page ranking also increase as daily visits increase and site content get better and update every day.
This page has "Answer" words repeated multiple times. It doesn't mean that it will not get indexed. It is how much useful is to every one.
I hope it will give you some idea
you have to manually detect the "Google Bot" from request's user agent and feed them little different content than you normally serve to your user.