Two Silly SEO questions

Marketing
1

These regard naming the URL and h1 tag usage.

Am I correct that the search engine doesn’t care where in the URL the keywords appear?

On my localhost, I have built my site as a series of folders*. Each folder encapsulates the index.htm, css and .png needed for a single page, The URL will contain only the name of the folder. For facetious example, “http://www.games-to-play.net/tictactoe”. Or do I need to forsake this approach, lose the unique directory and rename the index.htm to tictactoe.htm and have my URL read “http://www.games-to-play.net/tictactoe.htm”?

Is it okay to have the same h1 tag on each page?

Continuing with this example, the h1 tag on each page would read “Games To Play” with the name of the game, in this case “Tic Tac Toe”, as the h2 tag. Am I better off rendering “Games to Play” as an image displayed at the top of the page and rendering each page’s game title as the h1 tag?

Regards,

GrNadpa

*See bluedreamer’s response in my “Navigation – I’m making this too hard” post as to why I’ve taken this approach

2

I treat both of those URLs the same. The directory method is much cleaner and is more of the standard today. You can’t go wrong with either, but the .htm method becomes harder to manage over time.

I would not use “Games to play” as the H1 on every page. I would use it for the game title or maybe “Games to Play: Tic Tac Toe”.

If you go with just the title, you could still keep Games to Play on the page and put it in a span element or a div element

3

I agree with both of threehundred’s answer:

+1

you could still keep Games to Play on the page and put it in a span element or a div element

+1. Yes, that tends to be better than using an image. Or use them both together in an “image replacement” scenario.

Because each page is about a specific game, the name of that game should be in the main H1 title.

4

[font=calibri]To be honest, I think you’re at the point where the impact of changing these is going to be so minute that it probably won’t make any difference, so the best thing is to go with that you think works best for the design and usability of the site.

If the URL as entered and displayed is [noparse]www.games-to-play.net/tictactoe[/noparse] then that is what Google will record as the URL … they won’t morph it into [noparse]www.games-to-play.net/tictactoe/index.htm[/noparse] because that URL isn’t used anywhere public. For all they know or care, you could be using +MultiViews and simply be omitting the file extension. But even if Google did notice that, they really couldn’t give two hoots whether you have website.com/keyword.htm or website.com/keyword/index.htm. If it makes any difference at all, it is so small that it won’t be measurable.

In terms of what should be the <h1>, this has been a longstanding question. Until we are all using HTML5 where we can use <header to mark up the masthead and reserve <h1> for what is really the page title, it’s going to be a compromise that millions of websites choose to make. It doesn’t seem right to have your site branding not marked as a heading, and logically the right heading for it is <h1> because it can’t be anything else. Again, this is a case where Google is generally smart enough to know what is going on, and when it encounters a site where every page has the same generic <h1> but has a single unique <h2> that is correlated with the <title> (even if not exactly the same) then I’d bet a dollar to a drachma that their algorithms will understand what you’ve done and categorise it accordingly.

Remember, Google isn’t out there to enforce any arbitrary standards – their goal is to provide users with the most relevant answers to their queries. They will use information they glean from the URL structure, page structure and a whole range of other factors to determine that – if it’s clear what your page means, is and does then they will be happy with that, even if you haven’t used the “perfect” format.[/font]

5

Thank you.

Not sure I understand. Changing the example a bit, assume the root URL is GrNadpas-Games-On-Tricycles. So, for my home page might I have an <h1>Why Games on Tricycles</h1> and a linked page <h1>Tic Tac Toe on Tricycles</h1>? That is. keeping the “on tricycles” blurb not only appearing, but italicized, in each h1.

Actually I kind of like that, though I have not encountered such an approach.

6

You guys are provided excellent information, as I know and as I worked with some website. I have suggest to change the landing pages domain names according to the focused keywords for those pages and they have implement my suggestions and I have seen good results also. So if I am wrong then please suggest me better way.