STRONG and EM tags inside H1 and H2 and SEO on database-driven website

Question

I am trying to tweak the SEO of my Website, I have read a 400 SEO Bible PDF document that I came across. An aspect of my website that was not included in my SEO optimisation.

The STRONG and EM HTML tags. They do what B and I (bold/italic) tags do but they are very much needed by Google's bot, apparently, in order for it to understand what the page is about, and to index it in its particular way.

Now, I have around 28K products, each has among other fields a Title(varchar) and Desc(text) fields. Title and description.

I am now updating the titles and descriptions with <strong></strong> and <em></em> tags around the words I think are important and mostly, good keywords for me.

But since my website was already done with SEO in mind, the title and descriptions were inside <H1> and <H2> tags.

I thought and thought and managed to leave the text with <strong> and <em> clean in 2 places (the breadcrumbs /home/here/submenu/submenu2/ and the description), and the text stripped from STRONG and EM tags in the <h1> which is the title of every page.

There are more pages to think of optimising in this way and my question is :

Is it wise to leave the titles something like this?

<H1><strong>Parker pen</strong> <em>model 38Ak1</em></h1>

or just remove (with PHP) the <strong> and <em> tags and just have:

<H1>Parker pen, model 38Ak1</h1>

It is essential for me to understand if it's SEO wise to do this, so I'll do the same in other kinds of displaying pages and other arrangements on my website.

Answer 1

Matt Cutts has made it abundantly clear that clean, relevant content presented semantically and coded well is ultimately what Google is looking for. I recommend following him in the various social media and looking up his YouTube archive. Also, Danny Sullivan provides a lot of real-world information that is generally data-driven.

My personal opinion is that 'em' or 'strong' tags inside of an h-anything amount to overkill.

Google already views content wrapped in header tags as important. I don't know whether the extra emphasis would help. If it appears to Google that it resembles keyword stuffing, it might hurt. Might make for an interesting test...

Anyway, my not-yet-data-supported personal opinion is that for SEO purposes you might be better served by including related keywords in your item's blurb, and emphasizing your target keywords in a semantically natural way -there-.

SEO is a moving target on purpose, as Google doesn't want people gaming the system. Your 400 page bible may be a good start, but the older it is the more you're likely to have to tweak the advice. Following the guys I mentioned above, as well as other reputable SEO resources,has worked well for me. Sorry about not linking - I am at the gym on my phone.

Answer 2

Only google has silver bullet.

Just use simple rules

• one H1 per page
• one H2 per page
• a little H3
• use strong em if you haven't another choice. Assume that for blind people this tag increase sound level in text-to-speach.

For SEO will be better if you create smart system crosslinking inside you site. This boost ranks better than this games with tags.

Answer 3

Unless you can find actual evidence about the usefulness of strong or em tags, don’t use them pointlessly (like around the content a heading). In general, anything written about SEO should be taken with suspicion: many claims have been made without backing them up with facts.

Answer 4

You should always take a pinch of salt when reading SEO Guides as a lot of these guides on the net claim to be fact when really they base such information on what they believe rather than facts backed with evidence.

It is extremely unlikely that Google will reward any more juice to sites using em, strong, i, span and so forth within their H Tags. As a golden rule the best SEO is to cater for what you believe is best for your visitors. If using strong or em looks better in your headers then use them, but for just SEO purposes thats just crazy and I wouldn't even bother.

It is possible to style the within a header without using a strong tag, for example.

h1 {font-weight:bold;}
h2 {font-weight:400;}

Also you web masters may decide to use span tags over em or strong for example

<h1>Chapter <span>Five</span></h1>

h1 {font-weight:bold;}
h1 span {font-style: italic;font-weight:normal;}

Which would be exactly the same as.

<h1><strong>Chapter</strong> <em>Five</em></h1>

It's worth mentioning that there was a time that Google and other search engines valued the Bold, Italic tags much more than they do today, this was the early days of the internet and before we had things like CSS2, CSS3, HTML5, HTML4. There is just so many ways people can style their pages now. The best way to style a page is with as little code as possible. Using additional tags that is not-required is just messy and should be avoided.

This is not to say strong and em isn't good at all because it does help on the page within the content itself. But with this said other tags help too, span, i, hgroup, em, img, p, b, em, the list goes on and on... The best tags are those which makes sense to use for your visitors and not things read in a SEO books ;)

I base this information based on common sense due to the fact I've pointed out their are just to many ways you can style a header and the fact no one really knows how Google works.

Your best of worrying about how you can improve your site for your audience and offer content that is not offered else where, far to many people focus on the small things. :P

Answer 5

Having strong or em in a header tag does nothing for SEO. I would remove them.

SEO is all about relevance. Putting text into your headers gives the bots and idea of what the topic or topics of your page is about. Its been my experience with all of my websites that headers with only text and relative as possible titles (as your sound like) I got the best results. I'd have something like

< h1 > Parker Pen < /h1 > < h3 > model 38Ak1 < /h3 >