The use of header tags?

Search engines don't really parse CSS. So if you want the benefits of headers use the header tags and use CSS to format it.

CSS won't help SEO but it can be used to trick search engines because search engines don't understand it.

So you have have a H1 tag that is formatted with CSS to be very tiny, you can have a block of text positioned a million pixels off the screen....

In other words, don't expect the CSS to improve SEO. The only use CSS has with SEO is to fool search engines into thinking on page text is more important than it is and to remove formatting code from the text.

actually I was wondering if the css styles included with the phpbb theme already uses the header tag or if I should add them myself to tpl file, not using css to do it. And if so how should I place the header tag in the tpl? I already use h1 in viewtopic and in index body as the category. But not through css.

What you just wrote almost sounds like spam to me.

It is spam, that's the point.

Look, search engines will look for <h1> tags. The rationale is that it's the biggest most important text on the page.

The point I am making is that search engines don't understand CSS, so if you format all H1 tags as small text it has the same effect.

Likewise, if you make text really big with CSS the search engine will not give it extra weight.

so if you want the weight benefits of H1 use standard HTML h1 tags and format it how you want using css classes for H1.

If you see h1 classes in the CSS thar is only detailing how to format the text in teh h1 tags, without having text in those tags it will not get the h1 text weight.

That's what I am doing. Does h2 and 3 matter or only h1? I was thinking of H3 for the topics or titles or something.

They matter to different degrees. None are completely necessary.

BTW, all the SEO you are doing is undone by all teh other modding. Things like the links and shoutbox are SEO catasrophes.

the shoutbox I can make viewable to members only. The links, now that's another story. Are the links a catastrophe because they're dynamic, the coding is bad, or the sites I linked to? In other words is there something I can do about that besides removing it? I believe you mentioned this before in another post.

If you must have the links then keep them, my point is that it's all clutter that dillutes what you want the spiders to look at.

I would wrap as much of that (including the board stats) in a user logged in switch as possible.

Okay, clutter I can understand. I use the knowledge base mod, and submitted articles go to a forum, does having the articles in two places help or hinder?

Probably neither.