Trying to stuff the class attribute with keywords is a disastrous idea. Please don’t do that. Search engines won’t take any notice, and you’d just be pushing out dirty, meaningless code.
Most SEO advice you’ll find online is pure rubbish, so be very careful what you take to heart. The best advice to start with is read through Google’s various docs on SEO.
The place to put keywords in your titles is in the actual title text. But even then, don’t compromise meaning for keyword stuffing. Make sure titles are meaningful and honest.
Really great hearing this up front and to-the-point response. Glad you verified this for me. The thing I’ve been doing is studying this online seo report and that online seo report and this is better than that one and on & on…and it is quite daunting to where you understand all this conflicting info is so self-defeating. Going to look into the Google Docs thing. I had a pesky tag cloud widget appearing on 63 separate category pages and finally got that figured out…those tage were compromising the actual on-page seo of each separate page. Now I’m attempting to optimize each one, and in doing so I want to be certain I am doing things right.
I’m sure I’ve recommended this to you before, but IMHO you can’t beat Google’s “Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide” for advice on all the basics.
I don’t blog, but from that very guide I just mentioned comes this:
Even though this guide’s title contains the words “search engine”,
we’d like to say that you should base your optimization decisions first
and foremost on what’s best for the visitors of your site. They’re the
main consumers of your content and are using search engines to find
your work. Focusing too hard on specific tweaks to gain ranking in the
organic results of search engines may not deliver the desired results.
Search engine optimization is about putting your site’s best foot
forward when it comes to visibility in search engines, but your
ultimate consumers are your users, not search engines.
Which I would take to mean “write your post whatever length it needs to be to best convey your ideas to your audience without either unnecessary repetition, or excessive brevity”.
This is interesting because it has been noted on many so-called “optimization” blogs / reports etc., that roughly 1700 words is suggested as reasonable. I find that a bit much. I appreciate seeing this info you provided - TMI can be deadly
There is (IMHO) and awful lot of nonsense talked about SEO. You see it here on the Marketing forum: people post “absolute facts” about what length your articles should be, or what your keyword density should be, how many links it’s “OK” to build in one day - the list goes on. But if you ask them for an authoritative source to back up these claims, they can never produce one.
Google is actually very helpful, in that they do publish detailed guidelines. The starter guide is (obviously) the place to start, but if you look at their Webmaster Help, there’s a lot of other stuff, too. For example, this guide to posting images might be helpful to you: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/114016?hl=en
I don’t see anything there about how long (or short) your web pages or blog posts should be, and until I do, I’ll continue to believe that Google is far more concerned about the quality than the word count.
I couldn’t find any Google source reference just now, but I believe that the heading tags do get used at least in part to some degree.
But what is looked at is the text in them, not attribute values.
And they are headings
The way I look at them is that they add structure similar to an outline and indicate the main context of which their text content should be viewed.
For example, if I had a school assignment to write an essay about a type of humor and I decided to write about political humor, my essay outline might look like
title - Political Humor
first main heading - Motives
first main heading first sub heading - Damage Control
first main heading second sub heading - Distraction
first main heading third sub heading - Introducing Doubt
second main heading - Media
second main heading first sub heading - Cartoons
second main heading second sub heading - Editorials
second main heading third sub heading - Books
If I were to hand in an essay where the headings were “keyword lists” instead of “context” or the headings and their text content did not relate to each other I seriously doubt the instructor would give me a good grade.
I believe Google would do likewise for a web page.
That is, the “Golden Rule” is write your headings for human visitors to the site, not as an attempt to manipulate its position in Google SERPs.
As others have mentioned, “class” is for marking up with css and has nothing to do with the semantics (meaning) of the page.
There is a balance of writing for search engines and writing for humans. You have to do both.
In your example, why not simply take that class text and use that as the h1 text?
E.g.,
<h1>Hand painted artwork of skyscrapers for the art collector</h1>
Note a few things:
Important tags:
Meta Title
Meta Description
H1 (one and only one of these per page)
H2s (5-10 are ok, these are Subheads)
Body text. Sentences can include variant keywords, though Google is actually not bad at that.
Recent studies indicate that the top ranking result for various keywords has an average length of around 1800-1900 words. This is a correlation only, but it should indicate something.
Inbound links from more domains is the biggest correlation with highest ranking on search, and the link text also is highly correlated for ranking for that word/phrase.
Each page should compete for its relevant keywords/search, so each page’s Title (~50 characters), description (~150 characters), H1, H2s, etc., should be focused on the top keywords that matter.
