H1 and H2

[ellehaym]

Hi, I just have one question.

Do I get penalized by search engines if for example I switch the properties of H1 and H2 and if I also interchange their positions on a website?


See below:
Lorem Ipsum
Dolor Sit Amet

....from the text above H2 would be Lorem Ipsum which would contain the text properties of H1 (bigger and in bold) and H1 would be Dolor Sit Amet which would contain the text properties of H2 (smaller and in bold).

[NickTyler81]

For some reason this seems hard and I'm not sure it should be. IMO H tags have an effect on your rankings but how much is not that clear. My advice would be to make sure that they are consise, relavent, accessible and contain your keywords. Then you pretty much have all bases covered.

As for what order they are in and the bolding i'm not sure that would have enough impact to worry about.

[ellehaym]

I've read that it would be best to have the keyword placed on the H1 tag, however I'd like my business name to appear bigger and I want it on the first line.

H2: Business Name
H1: Keyword and Target Area

I am not sure if it will have a penalty on search engines though, that's why I want to make sure before I proceed with changing the codes.

[NickTyler81]

I think you could do well with that format. You are probably best to have your KW and target in the H1 tag.

I'm not sure why you can't have the h1 and h2 wherever you want on the page and if you mean first line of what's displayed in the serch results you should use the page title for that and have your keyword and your buisness name in a naturally readable way.

[NickTyler81]

Just seen you want the buisness name bigger. How about using CSS or a logo with alt tags and then you are free to use the H tags for keywords?

[Tiggerito]

The h tags are semantic markup to let you indicate what text you think is most important on a page. Also, from the early days Google stated that they take the size of text into account.

Google will consider these factors and more when analysing a page. Their final conclusions are a secret but your suggested usage would not cause any issues.

[puamana]

You can change the properties of the text within the H1 tag very easily - constrain it's visible size, etc... so it should not have anything to do with how you want the text to 'look'. It's more about placement and emphasis for the SPIDERS, it seems to me.

Also... if Google insisted on unaltered H1 tags, the there sure would be a lot of UGLY pages out there ...

[LD]

I control usage of those tags with CSS. Nothing worse than seeing a nicely laid out page wtih huge titles because of the H1/H2 tags.

[Clint1]

I control usage of those tags with CSS. Nothing worse than seeing a nicely laid out page wtih huge titles because of the H1/H2 tags.

I just used regular font tags for years, but in recent years I've also used CSS to do it.

[Clint1]

I've read that it would be best to have the keyword placed on the H1 tag, however I'd like my business name to appear bigger and I want it on the first line.

H2: Business Name
H1: Keyword and Target Area

I am not sure if it will have a penalty on search engines though, that's why I want to make sure before I proceed with changing the codes.

That's exactly what I do. But not just the bolding, also font size.

H2: Business Name (or something important, but not as important as keywords)

H1: Important keywords