Quote Originally Posted by Drwyd View Post
If there is enough interest I am willing to conduct an experiment. Currently two websites I am responsible for are #1 and #2 on Google for their brand name "Tower Forge" (out of 2.5 million other pages). Both use a H1 tag containing that key phrase. If I change the #1 site to use paragraph tags then that may (possibly by changing positions) shed some light on the subject.

Are there any experts here that could give me an idea as to how long it will take to have an effect (if any) and more importantly how long to recover as this is a commercial site that provides my main income.

Drwyd
Nice offer - but I don't think that would be meaningful. The words "Tower Forge" are in the Title and also feature in numerous other places on the pages including p tags - probably the precise reason they get #1 and #2 on the hit list - # of repetitions. I would not attribute that in any way to the existence of h1 tags. Also I suspect "Tower Forge" is not a highly searched general term (unlike say "wysiwyg web development") - after all the 6th item down in the Google UK page is Pigeon Forge TN - not exactly a good appropriate hit i.e. the competition is not great for "Tower Forge". When you have something that unique that people don't generally search for, you can be pretty confident of hits.

In fact my exercise has already determined/proven that h1 tags are unnecessary as the sole source of SE hits (I do not have any).

As an aside - notice the importance of the meta tag description as each hit is to a separate page and uses the meta tag description to entice people to select the link.

Unfortunately this is not algebra and you can only make sure that your page content is tailored to as many possible search terms in as many ways as possible - but clearly h1 etc. is not one to get overly excited about if the terms are adequately referenced and highlighted elsewhere.

I think the prime focus of the discussion now is their value from a wysiwyg development perspective.