Header Value

[addaminsane]

I know that in the past, seo has put a big emphases on keywords in header tags.

I'm a bit confused on the value of this today. Whenever you do a google search, it never shows you highlighted info from a heading.

It seems to only show you highlighted keywords within the page title, url, meta description if there is one, and content within <p> tags. </p>

[pokeragain]

Purely on a SEO basis, yes paragraph headers used to be recommended for using keywords by most SEOs. In some recent tests conducted by a prominent SEO company however, it appears headers (h1,2,...) had no effect on SERPs.

My take on this: use them, it does not kill; plus you can use them for marketing or writing purpose just to make your content more entertaining; will you go higher in SERPs because you have wonderful headers with the right key words, maybe yes, maybe not.

[addaminsane]

yeah, often times the headers when used for seo purposes affect usability/ readability of the page, so if thats not important i'd much rather make the headers more creative and relative to content.

[Tigerboy]

Google love to do all his offline methods of optimizations. So...go on and use headers...They are very usefull

[Michael Martinez]

Ignore any and all "SEO tests" claiming headers have no impact. The tests are not reliable.

Google documentation says that they try to treat Hx tags as roughly equivalent to BOLD plus a font size relative to the fonts of the rest of the text on the page. They have not disclosed how they calculate these font sizes.

Google documentation says that BOLDing your text is an acceptable way of showing emphasis (i.e., on-page optimization).

At SMX Advanced in Seattle this week Matt Cutts confirmed that Google still pays attention to H1s (in that he advised people NOT to put all their text into an H1).

The Hx HTML structure was never intended for use by search engines. It was intended to provide a means for creating structured lists in browsers and for organizing on-page information into sections.

If used accordingly, these HTML elements can assist search engines in deconstructing pages in a process that is sometimes referred to as page segmentation.

If used inappropriately, about the worst you'll accomplish is to make your page look ugly and you'll negate whatever algorithmic benefit the search engine might have bestowed.