H1 H2 & H3 Tags

[Ghome1971]

Just a few questions relating to SEO from previous threads

What are H1, H2, H3 and body tags and where they are in Actinic.

What is css?

Thanks

Geraldine

[wjcampbe]

A link to HTML basics http://www.w3.org/MarkUp/Guide/

[RuralWeb]

Check out:

http://www.w3.org/Style/CSS/

http://www.w3schools.com/tags/tag_hn.asp

[Ghome1971]

Thanks. The trouble is I'm trying to grasp/modify HTML withour really knowing what I am doing. I will read over those documents carefully.

To be specific how do I (as advised in a previous thread):

Put an H2 tag on the 'actinic breadcrumb' (whatever this is)

Put an H1 tag on the netquotvar:short description in the product page

Thanks

Geraldine

[pinbrook]

locate actinic.css in site1 - edit it with notepad

change the h1 tag definition to something like

h1 {
font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;
font-size: 13px;
font-weight: bold;
color: #000000;
}

change font family, size etc to fit your design.

locate your product template, find NETQUOTEVAR:PRODUCTNAME and wrap the h1 tags around it

<H1>NETQUOTEVAR:PRODUCTNAME</H1>

the H tags are known as heading tags, thus if Google sees an <H1> tag it assumes it is a heading and thus contains important text revelevant to the page, much like a newspaper heading.

H1 is more important than H2 and so on...

the same then applies to the breadcrumb - the templates for this are the ones starting with ACT_PARENT

[Ghome1971]

You would think Actinics standard templates would do this if it is important to SEO.

Geraldine

[Jan]

Hi Jo,

I am implementing this but have found that a blank line is automatically added after the header, I don't really want this is there a way to get rid of it?

It also makes the header bold and adding weight:lighter to the style doesn't seem to fix this, is there any way around this.

Does it matter now long your header is, to try to get around the extra line problem I made the product name and the bit of descriptive text after it all part of the header (hence the second problem) but now I have a rather long header. You can see what I have done at :

http://www.mole-end.biz/acatalog/One...r_Actinic.html

Regards,

[RuralWeb]

You would think Actinics standard templates would do this if it is important to SEO

Actinic is "shopping cart" software that happens to be very good out of the box in SEO terms, what you are attempting to do with your modifictions is to take it to the next level.

Some of these techniques are not agreed on by many designers and they would not want them included as standard. There is no ABC of SEO but Actinic dose allow individual users to use what they think best which is why you now need to get your hands dirty.

[pinbrook]

Your resultant code

<h1><font size="3">Multi-user One Stop Order Processing for Actinic<br></font>
<font color="black" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" font-weight="normal" size="2">Process 90% of your orders in 10% of the time
from any PC. Find existing orders quickly and easily.&nbsp; Available for Actinic V4, V5, V6, V7 and
Actinic V7 multiuser.</font></h1>

Ok if I were doing this this is how I'd do it.

<h1><font size="3">Multi-user One Stop Order Processing for Actinic<br></font>

is replaced with

<h1>Multi-user One Stop Order Processing for Actinic</H1>

a nice short punchy precise keyphrase

put font size=3 into the css definition for H1

<font color="black" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" font-weight="normal" size="2">Process 90% of your orders in 10% of the time
from any PC. Find existing orders quickly and easily.&nbsp; Available for Actinic V4, V5, V6, V7 and
Actinic V7 multiuser.</font></h1>

is not part of H1. To me there is no real importance to this phrase SEO wise, therefore I wouldn't bring it forward. You could argue that "Actinic V4, V5, V6, V7 and Actinic V7 multiuser" contains keyphrases but there are betterways to optimise for these phrases than lump them into one huge H1.

For arguements sake if I absolutely had to do this I would use <H2> and have <font color="black" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" font-weight="normal" size="2"> in the css so that again your code is clean

<H2>Process 90% of your orders in 10% of the time from any PC. Find existing orders quickly and easily. Available for Actinic V4, V5, V6, V7 and Actinic V7 multiuser.</H2>

or the following might be just as effective

<strong>Process 90% of your orders in 10% of the time from any PC. Find existing orders quickly and easily. Available for Actinic V4, V5, V6, V7 and Actinic V7 multiuser.</strong>

[pinbrook]

forgot to say add

margin:0;
margin-top: 2px;
margin-bottom: 2px;

to your css to reduce the spacing above and below the H1 tag

margin : 0 will set all 4 sides to 0, which we then override for top and bottom

[Ghome1971]

I'm new to this so a little slow!

Do I actually need to put text within the <h1> </H1> within Act_ProductLine and then Act_ParentSectionLine (Section name) or does Google find this from the entry on 'name' or 'short description'

I'm confused as Jan has actually entered the text.

Geraldine

[Jan]

I'm confused as Jan has actually entered the text.

I don't use the standard Actinic templates, I write my templates in a HTML editor and then use a netquotevar include to display them. I initially changed my product templates and nothing happened, which is why I have done it as I have.

Regards.

[Jan]

Hi Jo,

Thanks for that, I have made the changes you outlined and it is all working perfectly now, it is just as I wanted it.

Regards,

[RuralWeb]

You should note that messing with H1 tags to make the text they enclose look normal ie gaining the SEO benefit while hiding the effect of the tag is considered spam by Google, even if you hide it in the css.

[Ghome1971]

I've carried out Jo's instructions and it all seems to be working.

Should I do the same to fragment titles?

Thanks

Geraldine