Bold vs. Header Tags in CSS Styles for SEO

[chrison600]

Hi all,

Currently, I use font weight "bold" in a CSS style that is applied to my company name throughout the site.

I'm wondering, from an SEO perspective, if I should opt to use a Header tag instead?

Is that possible in a CSS style?

Thanks!

Chris

[janeth]

Hi Chris yes and yes.

The header tags carry more weight and you can use them in CSS you also have more control over them with CSS

[Mel]

Yes header tags carry more ranking weight, but they should not be used indescrminantly all over the Place. Header tags are meant to be used as a summary of the next paragraph or section that follows the tag, and since they are summaries of what the page is about they are given extra weight.

SEs are smart enough to see how you are using the tags and if you use them excessively it is possible that they might penalize you for excessive use, just like they do when you stuff keywords williy nilly into the page

[ppeter]

Hi folks. Wondered if you could help me with two little quandries...

Firstly, how do search engines, google particularly, take the different media types of CSS, or do they completely ignore CSS altogether?
For example, if I have a portion of content specifically created for screen readers and I used CSS to only display this for such readers (setting the CSS media type to 'aural'), would it be seen by SEs?

Secondly, If I have an image inside a heading tag such as <h1> and that image contains alt text eg.

<h1>pic.gif</h1>
Will it get treated the same as

<h1>My Piccy</h1>

Thanks.

[Mel]

The search engines read the code and in my experience they pretty mcuh ignore the attributes that are set for print, or screen or reader or...

I have never tried to work with the aural attribute, which I believe is only implemented in CSS2, but other content inside attributes like the screen attribute hidden or display none, do get read and indexed much like normal text.

As far as putting a graphic inside an H tag that is at best not good usage, and at worst might be flagged as spam IMO.

[chrison600]

I see,

OK. Then is it better to use a graphic for a header and include an ALT and maybe also a Title attribute, or should I use text with a Header Tag?

Thanks,

Chris

[janeth]

If you use graphic's use ALT

For the header tag as Mel said it is for text and think of it as Minstrel has said before like the header at the top of the news paper.

As Mel pointed out if you abuse it the search engines will not be happy