I read a blog today that said having H2-H6 headings (rather than H1) in your website will increase your google ranking. Can somebody tell me what this is and how do I do it?

Is it possible I have this already and don't know it? I use Microsoft Office Live Basic if that makes a difference.

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Rebecka Melson ~ Virtual Business Services

Hamid is telling me that as far as he's aware H1 is still 'better' but people come up with new theories based on experiment and experience all the time...I'm also wondering if maybe the author meant that it's best to have H2 as well as 1?
Do you have a link to the post you read by any chance so I can check it out and respond further to the ways in which search engines understand the tags?

I'm really not sure how MOLB works, but assuming it allows for basic HTML tags you just wrap the text for your page headings like this:

<h1>text</h1>

Which would then be followed by a well written related paragraph using variations on the related keywords. (But assume readability for your users first, search engines second)

Second headings (relatively) are <h2>text</h2>

Again, accompanied by a well written related paragraph using variations of your keywords. (Always assuming readability for your users first, search engines second - keeping in mind that too many keywords makes the paragraph hard to read and subject to being completely ignored or given penalty by the search engines)

and so on for the third... Hope this helps!

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Here, I just copied the article posted on active rain because I'm not sure if you can view it without being a member and logged in.

Which web page elements lead to high Google Rankings ? New study: which web page elements lead to high Google rankings?

The German company Sistrix analyzed the web page elements of top ranked pages in Google to find out which elements lead to high Google rankings. They analyzed 10,000 random keywords, and for every keyword, they analyzed the top 100 Google search results.

Which web page elements lead to high Google rankings?

Sistrix analyzed the influence of the following web page elements: web page title, web page body, headline tags, bold and strong tags, image file names, images alt text, domain name, path, parameters, file size, inbound links and PageRank.

Keywords in the title tag seem to be important for high rankings on Google. It is also important that the targeted keywords are mentioned in the body tag, although the title tag seems to be more important.
Keywords in H2-H6 headline tags seem to have an influence on the rankings while keywords in H1 headline tags don't seem to have an effect.
Using keywords in bold or strong tags seems to have a slight effect on the top rankings. Web pages that used the keywords in image file names often had higher rankings. The same seems to be true for keywords in image alt attributes.
Websites that use the targeted keyword in the domain name often had high rankings. It might be that these sites get many inbound links with the domain name as the link text.
Keywords in the file path don't seem to have a positive effect on the Google rankings of the analyzed web sites. Web pages that use very few parameters in the URL (?id=123, etc.) or no parameters at all tend to get higher rankings than URLs that contain many parameters.
The file size doesn't seem to influence the ranking of a web page on Google although smaller sites tend to have slightly higher rankings.
It's no surprise that the number of inbound links and the PageRank had a large influence on the page rankings on Google. The top result on Google has usually about four times as many links as result number 11.

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Any questions ? This is interesting stuff and an eye opener too....

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Rebecka Melson ~ Virtual Business Services

Hmmm, well some of this interests me - some of it I disagree with - namely the part about the number of links...in my own experience, it's the quality of links more than the number that can make a difference in returning your site as a result for certain keywords. Another thing that makes a big difference in natural result returns is the URL and relative site title - but there are other things that webmasters can do to manipulate results.

I haven't heard of this differentiation between the different H tags, but will be curious to see if this is a new trend that we'll start hearing about. Chances are, if it's viable it'll pop up (or already has) at the major SEO blogs and sites.

Certainly an interesting piece of info - thanks so much for posting!
Rebecka, did I answer your question on how to implement the tags? If not, let me know

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