Comments on: How Important Are Headings These Days?

By: Fred

Fred — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 20:01:08 +0000

Proper use of heading tags is still SOP with us -- while there's plenty of love to be had from links, who wants to miss out on what good well-coded HTML can offer? While I doubt that heading tags will make or break a page, good semantic markup reinforces what a page is about, both for users, and search engines, which is more than reason enough to add them, imho. Fred Freds last blog post..Flypaper: Helping the Average Joe Get Flashy

By: SEOAly

SEOAly — Wed, 06 Aug 2008 15:10:10 +0000

Hey, Steve. Thanks for your comment. As far as I know, headings have no influence over the text shown within SERPs. Most search engines either choose to use the page’s META description…which is why the META description for a page should always be a solid call to action that will ultimately entice the search user to click through to the site.

Sometimes search engines simply select text content from the page itself to display as the “description” within SERPs. There are a number of robots tags available that can help you better control what description is shown within the results.

The first is “noodp”, which is designed to prevent DMOZ from overwriting the title and description – this only works for the home page, as far as I know. There is also the “noydir” tag which stops the description and title tag overwrites often carried out by the Yahoo! Directory. The last, “nosnippet”, applies to Google and helps to prevent Google from generating a description based on the text content of the page.

There may be other ways to address such issues, but those are the tactics I have employed in the past to better control what search users see when my sites appear within search results.

Thanks for taking time to comment! :)

By: steve

steve — Wed, 06 Aug 2008 07:16:15 +0000

Let’s say that as far as search engines go, heading tags made no difference in terms of SEO (incidentally – I think they do). So someone comes along with a web page that ranks #1 through xyz searches. There’s still no guarantee that the user will click through to the page. Who knows what the browser will display as the search result extract. At least by using proper headings we can contol what will be displayed as the ‘call to action’ to the user.

If i’m wrong, please let me know.