A client of the company I work for has recruited a Search Optimization consultant to critique a website we've built for them that is yet to go live.
Now I'm no SEO expert but I'm also aware that some of these "professionals" aren't either.
Anyway the site didn't get slated so thats okay, but they've advised the client to get us to employ a little trick with <h2> tags. In theory it sounds like it might work - search engines crawl for h1, h2 , h3 tags etc before anywhere else on the page, and so if you wrap words and phrases in your body text in h2 that have been styled to look like regular text, the spider will look at them first after your title.
However, I have several problems with this:
1) an h2 tag is a block level element, and placing it within a <p> is invalid markup. Bye bye validation logos...
2)using CSS to switch it to an inline element does not seem to be working correctly in Firefox, IE7, or Opera, or any of the current generation browsers (please correct me if I'm wrong, I may have not nailed the complete CSS declaration yet - its still putting a line break in before the h2 tag but not line breaking afterwards, I don't blame the browsers mind you!)
3) the search engines will penalise you if you get trigger happy and wrap h2 around every other sentence, which lets face it, the client is going to do
I'm going to have to do it anyway, but I was just wondering if anyone else had done this, and whether they thought it was a good idea.... oh, and if I must do it how can I properly disguise the H2 tag??
[EDIT] I'm compromising by making them wrap short paragraphs with <h2> instead of <p>, so that solves problems 1 and 2.... FCK Editor wouldn't play the game either otherwise.
Bad SEO advice?
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- Skittlewidth
- Forum Contributor
- Posts: 389
- Joined: Wed Nov 06, 2002 9:18 am
- Location: Kent, UK
That is very bad SEO advice. I'm afraid your client has hired the wrong "SEO consultant". What a waste of money. Really. Is it strange these guys get a bad name? Well, before I go on ranting for pages and pages (and this forum gets ranked no 1 for the term "bad SEO consultant") I'll stop and give my advice regarding your questions.
I would NOT use h2's inside paragraph tags. Just don't. First of all, if, or better said when, search engines find out what is happening the site gets penalized and dropped out the index. The validation is the least of your concerns here.
Why not use the h2's like they should be used, but only a bit more often? That will also aid the users of the website, because it makes scanning the page easier.
Why not think some more about the way the text of the pages is written? Use a lot of headers (h2, h3, h4) and short paragraphs of text. Again, this will aid your users.
You see, you don't have to pull of dirty tricks to trick the engines. If you do it the right way for your users, the search engines will like it as well. certainly in the long run.
And lastly, please let your client spend that money on a good copywriter. Let the copywriter write interesting and useful content for the website. then the visitors will come. The incoming links will come. And the search engine results will come. I guarantee that.
I would NOT use h2's inside paragraph tags. Just don't. First of all, if, or better said when, search engines find out what is happening the site gets penalized and dropped out the index. The validation is the least of your concerns here.
Why not use the h2's like they should be used, but only a bit more often? That will also aid the users of the website, because it makes scanning the page easier.
Why not think some more about the way the text of the pages is written? Use a lot of headers (h2, h3, h4) and short paragraphs of text. Again, this will aid your users.
You see, you don't have to pull of dirty tricks to trick the engines. If you do it the right way for your users, the search engines will like it as well. certainly in the long run.
And lastly, please let your client spend that money on a good copywriter. Let the copywriter write interesting and useful content for the website. then the visitors will come. The incoming links will come. And the search engine results will come. I guarantee that.
- Skittlewidth
- Forum Contributor
- Posts: 389
- Joined: Wed Nov 06, 2002 9:18 am
- Location: Kent, UK
I agree with you, and I practise most if not all of the things you suggested as part of my general web development. I can't vouch for whether the client hired a copywriter or not, since they manage the text through the content management system, but there aren't too many reams of text on the page, and each page has an h1 or h3 tag as standard. (As you know I've had to take out the h2 tag).
I reckon that the SEO consultant couldn't find anything else to suggest that hadn't been thought of already and feared they might not get paid!
Anyway, I haven't resorted to <h2> tags within paragraph tags, so at least my pages will still validate (and I'm sure a well formed xhtml document will perform better when being indexed anyway).
Sadly this is one of those sites that has now been ruined once the client was let loose on the cms (lots of client uploaded clipart!!!) so it won't be going in my portfolio list anytime soon....sigh
I reckon that the SEO consultant couldn't find anything else to suggest that hadn't been thought of already and feared they might not get paid!
Anyway, I haven't resorted to <h2> tags within paragraph tags, so at least my pages will still validate (and I'm sure a well formed xhtml document will perform better when being indexed anyway).
Sadly this is one of those sites that has now been ruined once the client was let loose on the cms (lots of client uploaded clipart!!!) so it won't be going in my portfolio list anytime soon....sigh