Are headers & paragraphs correct way 2 go with SEO!

[Dal123]

Sorry people - another post about SEO .
After reading a couple of books on web design, both books say that headers and paragraphs were the way to go (and this concurs with internet research) But; when I check-out my competitors, I find they are using xhtml-transitional, set-out in tables .
This research has happened mostly with my competitors as this is the only research I am conducting- as relevant in my field!
Has anybody else noticed this? I remember one of the books said that data was followed more closely in tables, which was disputed in the other book!
My research so far - has showed convincingly, that Transitional and tables is the most effective SEO .

 

[angelwatt]

The short answer is "content is king." Relevant and quality information on a web site will naturally result in better search ranking due to people finding the site useful, which will result in other sites being more likely to link to them. Wikipedia works in this way. They likely haven't invested much in ad words, yet their quality content has caused people to take notice and link to them a lot. While semantic HTML does help SEO, not having it does not penalize a site. Also, the various SEO techniques are not equally weighted. Inbound links are one of the more highly weighted forms of SEO, which is why spammers spend so much time doing link farms, though Google quickly catches these and ignores links associated with them, but the spammers make farms all the time.

 

[djdavidgallant]

You certainly need heading tags, and paragraph text for your websites. While headers are weighted in the formula, they can only get you so far. A perfect webpage will get you on ranked at last page on Google without any inbound links.
Check out www.websitegrader.com by the way. It is a fun tool that my company built out for a birds eye view SEO analysis.

 

[SailorTom]

You certainly need heading tags, and paragraph text for your websites. While headers are weighted in the formula, they can only get you so far. A perfect webpage will get you on ranked at last page on Google without any inbound links.
Check out www.websitegrader.com by the way. It is a fun tool that my company built out for a birds eye view SEO analysis.

Thanks for the link. Just tried it out, pretty awesome. 16% for current site (LOL) but 70% for the replacement i'm working on

 

[Cromulent]

My research so far - has showed convincingly, that Transitional and tables is the most effective SEO .

No it hasn't. It has just shown that your competitors don't know what they are doing.

Frankly though the most important thing is content and back links. If you don't have any then nothing you will do when it comes to tweaking your HTML and CSS will make much of a difference. It certainly won't hurt, but it won't be the help that decent back links will be.

So in order of priorities:

1. Add some really good content that people actually want to read - not just marketing crap - make it interesting to Joe public
2. Get back links to your site
3. Tidy up your HTML and CSS and make sure they validate correctly
4. Make sure your page loads fast - Google has started taking into account page load speed in ranking

 

[Dal123]

Thanks for that link Dave - pretty cool!
Don't understand why mine has more links (about 60), and my competitor has only 10 but is ranked #1.

Thanks Cromulent, wasn't aware that page speed is now rank-able. It just seems strange that my competitors (multi-million/ billion pound firms) have their websites in transitional and tables . They've obviously had true designers with their pages and obviously must be doing something right to be ranking so well. I wasn't thinking about joe-public just trying to appeal to the industry as most joe public don't know what formwork is. But I can see your point here and I think I'll word my new site around this so thanks for that Cromulent .

 

[designguy79]

Don't understand why mine has more links (about 60), and my competitor has only 10 but is ranked #1.

Are you talking about one of the sites in your signature? Google isn't finding *any* links for either of them!

The rank of the sites that you are linked on makes a difference, too. So 1 link from a web site with a PR of 9 is exponentially better than 100 links from PR 1 sites.

Also, did you check the source code of your back links to see if they are "nofollow"? If you are using Firefox, press Cmd+U to view the source code, then look for the link to your site. If it says rel="nofollow" in the "a" tag, Google will *not* "count it."

HTH...

~ Jeremy

 

[manueld]

While links are important, quality of the site that is linking to you is also just as important. Call it a popularity contest, a site that links to your site that is considered more authoritative is going to have more weight that one that is not. A good example of this is .edu and .gov websites will always be better inbound links.

 

[MattSepeta]

Yay

My site has a 73%! Yesssss......

 

[design-is]

Hi Dal

Been following your site development, might be slow going, but you're getting there... Thought it was time to chip in:

It just seems strange that my competitors (multi-million/ billion pound firms) have their websites in transitional and tables . They've obviously had true designers with their pages and obviously must be doing something right to be ranking so well.

Just because they are multi-million/billion pound firms, doesn't mean that they have invested in good web design (or other design). It's likely that they have old sites which were built 'in the good old days'. Otherwise, they haven't gone with a respectable company / agency for their site development.

Sites built with up-to-date best practices and standards (separation of content from design and behaviour using semantically written HTML, CSS & JS) will always be nicer for a search bot to see and crawl. Other factors are at work which may push a badly built/designed site to the top, but rest assured that having a bad site didn't help them.

Having great content in a well designed and usable layout, making a site that's useful, making it worth people visiting, will, over time, give you a good ranking. Combine time with back linking, advertising, and a good amount of non-web based promotion and you might get to the front page of Google for your required search terms.

However... I'm not sure if you've mentioned yet what search terms you're actually targeting...?

/Doug

p.s. my site got 85% at the website grader... pretty happy with that for now anyway

 

[rdowns]

The last site I created (sales and marketing) for my company scored a 91. Pretty happy with that.

 

[Nermal]

I just stumbled upon this tool and decided to run it on my site. 95

There's a lot of information provided by the report, so it'll make for interesting reading. Thanks for the tool