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Hi levalencia1

H1 tags are a ranking factor, though one of so many and have a very small direct impact on rankings.

Is still worth having an appropriate & relevant H1 tag though, perhaps more-so for User Experience than for SEO.

Ideally, H1 tags would be actual text rather than a logo or an image.  However so long as the logo/image has descriptive Alt Text (which it does in the example in your question, though maybe 'Printers & Printer Supplies' would be better than the brand name) then that's also fine.

Hope that helps,

Regards

Simon

Hi Annie

I'm surprised there hasn't been lots of answers to your question.

Check-out this video here on SEOmoz entitled  "Whiteboard Interview - Google's Matt Cutts on Redirects, Trust + More" featuring Matt Cutts being asked some questions by Rand.  It opens with a partial answer to your first question:

"These days we use it a little less" (2 years ago)  ~  basically means that in locations such as the US, most of Europe, Japan... & so on, where Bandwidth is rarely an issue anymore, 'If-Modified-Since' isn't taken notice of, it's not worth including anymore.

In say developing countries where bandwidth is sometimes still on the low side, it may still be used, hence why a sweeping 'it doesn't matter anymore' statement wasn't given.

**Your second question:  **

• Content, fresh unique value-adding content that is, that's engaging and shareable, is always a positive aspect to work on, which in turn can lead to some awesome new links. This encourages the bots to visit more regularly.
• Ensuring that your site doesn't have any technical issues (say causing significant downtime).
• Ensuring that Robots.txt isn't wrongly disallowing any pages from being crawled.
• Keeping an eye on Google Webmaster Tools (& Bing Webmaster Tools) for any messages or errors.
• You can alter the crawl rate in GWT, though is usually best to leave it on the default auto setting.

Hope that helps,

Simon

Hi Catherine

It's still considered good practice to include a sitemap.xml though not always essential.

It's debatable as to whether or not it actually brings benefit to do so (likely does in some cases such as for dynamic sites and new sites) though as Webmaster Tools still has the facility to receive sitemap.xml files through a submission, is usually good to spend a little time creating one. One more tick in the box for on-site SEO.

A good read on this topic can found at  http://www.brilliantthinking.net/2012/05/22/benefits-of-a-google-xml-sitemap/

Hope that helps,

Simon