RelevantText.com

Experimenting with H1 headers

October 10th, 2007 Jason Posted in seo |

I’m driving a little experiment on one of our sites, based on something I noticed on the W3C home page.

With images on, the page looks like this:

With images off, you get this:

“Basic image-replacement CSS,” you may think, but it’s not even that involved. The text is, indeed, just the alt text for the image.

<h1 id="logo"><img alt="The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)" height="48" width="315" src="/Icons/w3c_main" /></h1>

OK, big deal, right?

Well, what caught my eye was the <h1> wrapping around the logo image. With images off, the alt text renders as an <h1>-level heading. In this case, it’s completely proper for the site, since it is at the very top of the page. But in my understanding, this is also what a searc h spider would see when crawling the page.

I did loads of digging around to see if anyone was talking about the potential to exploit this. Surely, if the header logo of your site could be replaced by a big fat relevant <h1> keyword or two at the top of every page, this would be something everybody knew about, right?

Apparently not.

So, we’re trying it out. One of our sites uses an image for the header tagline, and the alt text needed attention anyway. We’ve now wrapped the logo and tagline images in an <h1> tag, so with images off we have a keyword-rich, branded header appearing sitewide. I’m not convinced that this will be any kind of SEO silver bullet, but it will be interesting to see what - if anything - happens with traffic for the keyword. I don’t think it will hurt, although there is some question whether the header logo link will come off as any more spammy than normal. If nothing else, though, it’s a big step for usability.