Trying to SEO a site that used Header Tags for Design

[CKerr]

I am trying to SEO a website that was built years ago and uses Header tags for design.  The site must have 25

and

tags used for design purpose. Is there any way to work around this problem?  Perhaps a code that tells Google to ignore these as Headers?  The web designers say that they are looking to fix the problem sometime this summer but you never know if that means it a month away or years away.  I really want to help this website but I believe that the Header tags are one of the reasons that his site does not show in the top 100  rankings for any keywords.  Any help would be great.

www.wallybuysell.com

Chris.K

[JCurrier]

I agree with Federico, the styling should be fixed through CSS and probably before you start doing any other work. Making these changes really shouldn't take that long.

Since the site owner is wanting SEO done for his site, he/she would probably listen to your advice on getting the site cleaned up as soon as possible. Just state the issue and let them know that this problem is potentially costing them money.

[MoosaHemani]

Chris, I have a normal practice not to start with off-page optimization when on-page is not really fixed and this is because if the on-page is not fixed you cannot taste the real power of links...

This is common that the header tags are set with CSS as many websites do this from time to time...i think what you should do is to communicate the issue with the client and tell them how important it is to fix this problem as soon as possible.

[FedeEinhorn]

Hi Chris,

It's been proven that the main issue with h1 and h2 tags is that people uses them everywhere within the design, while there's a reason for the 1, 2, 3, etc. h2 is used to denote your primary heading, h3 to denote your h2, and so on.

You could change the other h1, h2 (that are less important) and use h3 and h4 accordingly by styling the h3 and h4 in the CSS.

The only bad thing to do there would be to hide (display:none) any of the headings.

Hope that helps!