Bad SEO advice?
Posted: Tue Jan 16, 2007 4:07 am
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.
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.