h1 tag, have I made a mistake here

[pne]

Hi Guys,

Have a question re use of h1 tag. I've decided to make h1 tag a block of text

<h1><font size="-1" face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" color="#000000"><font color="#4D4D4D">An Employee Assistance Programme is an increasingly essential part of the Employee Benefits Package, providing Counselling advice services for staff experiencing problems either in the workplace or at home. SoChoose has developed a discreet, online EAP, delivering advice, information and testing 24/7.</font> </font> </h1>

on homepage. Will this help/harm? It has lots of keywords/phrases. BTW site at www.sochoose.com

pne

[bvi]

I am trying to recall character limit rules for H1 tags, but I would guess it is a bit long not only for search engines, but as a customer reading the Title of the page/article. I would structure like this:

H1 "some main keywords, brief"
text
H2 "subtitle points with keywords, brief"
text
H2, H3
you get the idea. I would think that would be more beneficial if you can break up your content like that.

[bhartzer]

I generally don't make h1 tags longer than one line. Personally, I think that's going a little bit overboard with it, and I don't think the search engines would like it.

After all, why are you doing it? If it's to influence search engine rankings, then it's not going to be something you'll want to do. The engines don't like anything on your page that is done for them and not for the visitors.

[pne]

bhartzer,

I'm still a little unclear. I both have and haven't done it for the SE's. It's a clear (I hope) statement about the service/site/page. It's also the text that appears at the top of the homepage and I thought it might be helpful to spell that out to the SE's. What do you think?

pne

[scallihan]

Originally Posted by pne

Hi Guys,

Have a question re use of h1 tag. I've decided to make h1 tag a block of text

<h1><font size="-1" face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" color="#000000"><font color="#4D4D4D">An Employee Assistance Programme is an increasingly essential part of the Employee Benefits Package, providing Counselling advice services for staff experiencing problems either in the workplace or at home. SoChoose has developed a discreet, online EAP, delivering advice, information and testing 24/7.</font> </font> </h1>

on homepage. Will this help/harm? It has lots of keywords/phrases. BTW site at www.sochoose.com

pne

I don't think it helps you. By including so many words in your H1 element, you dilute the extra weight given to any included keyphrase you'd be better off focusing on, it seems to me. You're also using the H1 element for a non-structural and non-standard purpose. The text should be in your introductory paragraph, not your H1 element.