SEO - how to distinguish the myth from the truth?

Question

HTML

Lately, I’ve been hearing a lot of SEO-related statements from colleagues that seem questionable to me, to put it mildly. I myself am a designer and layout designer.
Here are some that came to mind offhand (italics in brackets are my notes):
1. The H1 heading should be strictly one and located in the code as close to the beginning as possible.
2. Headings H2 is undesirable to do more than 2-3 per page. ( Really? The W3C is not shy about using 20 times per document in its specifications ).
3. Headings of level H[n+1] should always be "nested" in H[n] - that is, go in the code strictly after the first occurrence of the heading of the previous level header).
4. It is undesirable to use the strong tag on the page more than 1-2 times ( And if the content is really like that? Again, I opened one of the W3C specifications - I counted 40+ uses there ).
5. It is undesirable to include the A tag inside the H* headers ( I do this all the time - everything is lost? )
6. The page gains additional weight when it refers to itself through # ( Mobius page? ).
7. It is highly undesirable to duplicate the same links (for example, a link to a large photo from the preview and it from the title) - the link weight is "blurred".
In general, I have long had the impression that SEO is such a shamanism with an extreme lack of objective information. Everything is built on a small amount of experimental and heuristic data, and heavily seasoned with myths, conjectures, behind-the-scenes gossip (where a conjecture retold N times becomes a fact), etc.
I do not call for starting another holivar on this topic (but I do not prevent it either :) The
question is more different: where can one get serious proofs or refutations of the above statements?
This may be official documentation of search engines or the results of serious independent research / tests.
Share links.

Answer 1

static.googleusercontent.com/media/www.google.com/...

Answer 2

The problem is that there is no reliable information. Google's documentation frankly does not correspond to reality, up to completely opposite statements, that is, the guys from Google themselves do not know how it works for them. And the experiments last several months and do not guarantee objectivity, you can get a contradictory result. there is no complete information about the process. I can understand people who, from their experience, have derived a rule about limiting the number of headers and strongs, I roughly understand why they do this. To more accurately tune in to keywords. Headers they have a little more weight and you can easily drop the page in the search results with inappropriate headers.

Answer 3

The information is outdated. If you use HTML4, then all items are relevant. With proper use of HTML5 - items 1-5 lose their relevance. Clause 7 is essentially correct, only there is a point here - you can use multiple links, just you can hang nofollow on everything except one. Item 6 is generally nonsense.
The trick is that 9 out of 10 SEOs are really half-educated shamans with a narrow outlook. These hamsters pass on such myths from mouth to mouth, it is very difficult to refute them, since science is not very accurate. The effect of the changes does not come soon, and since, say, 1 month, several changes are made in different planes (and not one point), and after 2-3 months the result appears, it is almost impossible to understand what exactly caused this result, it was is it one of these changes or a combination of them, and which combination of which changes.
In general, Google is pursuing the right policy - slowly tightening the screws for artificial SEO, bringing CONTENT to the fore and foreground. That is why organic traffic is called organic - it is a natural result that directly depends on the quality and relevance of the content.

Answer 4

For some reason, you mixed w3c standards and SEO things,
Seo separately standards separately and then everything will be clear to you.

Answer 5

"Some say - you need to drink more, others say - you need to drink less, but everyone agrees on one thing - you need to drink."
This is what SEO is.
I had a site for the 1s service, it was small, rarely changed, did nothing for promotion, did not optimize, but in the search results in the city the page was in first place ahead of all franchisees ... so they dashed off the cart in 1s and 1s asked to cover the page , because I was not a franchisee :)
Magic, however :))))

Answer 6

webdesign.tutsplus.com/articles/the-state-of-seo-i...

Answer 7

HeadOnFire absolutely rightly noted about the headers - now items 1-5 are outdated. Nevertheless, nesting headers is a sign of logic and, as a result, good manners. The number of them does not matter either for SEO or for standardization under HTML5. Abuse of strong is justifiably punished. If your text is all 100% bold, then it means there is nothing to highlight in a comparative sense and, on the contrary, it should be all regular. For a lot of bold text, the B tag is used, and strong is needed to show the logical significance of a passage or word.
Manipulations with internal links are only good if they transfer traffic, in real SEO, which gives results, the word "weight" has already been forgotten. Therefore, 6 and 7 are shamanism.

Answer 8

There is a song called "Will and Reason" used to be the motto of someone who doesn't like hummus much today. Yandex's motto is "logic and structure". In this vein, you need to think when optimizing the site.

Answer 9

There is a guide to optimization from Google itself. You can read about headers there. And there are related topics. For example, headings H1 and TITLE. Should I make them the same or different? There was an article on this subject. Yes, there is a lot of shamanism. system closed by Google and Yandex. What and how influences only on the basis of experience can be understood. And he is different for everyone.

Answer 10

1 heading is required. 2 headlines will be crap complete verified

Answer 11

Of course shamanism. Whether it's programming - read the documentation and you will be happy. It won’t work like that with SEO, so you have to practice shamanism, dance with tambourines, constantly test what works and what doesn’t. It worked in one niche, not in the other. If all dependencies were known, then that search engine is worthless