Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Does it matter what text you wrap in an H1 tag?
-
Typically H1 tags are reserved for page headings, i.e. on a blog post the blog post title is very often the pages H1, or top-level heading as the W3C puts it.
On the SEOmoz home page they currently have "SEO Software." as their H1 tag, which seems perfectly reasonable and to me fits the W3C criteria.
However, what if the primary keyword for SEOmoz was "seo community" so they decided to wrap just those two words in the sentence that follows on their home page and maintain the existing style of the words "seo community" with CSS. (see attachment)
Are there any arguments against doing that?
Would Google be able to detect this? If so, would Google care?
I do believe the overall importance of the H1 tag has lessened to a degree, however I still believe they are valuable to an extent and would love to hear anyone's thoughts.
-
The same H1 rule goes for all other headers.
Headers are headers, mixing them in with the text content isn't very helpful in a user perspective.
A quick tip is to try to add questions to the h2 to keep the text SEO and user friendly.
So let's rephrase this into a h2 question:
Interested in commercial landscaping design?
We're the ones to call!
Call us at 1-866-236-7263 or contact us by email.
Hope I could help
Best,
Gustav
-
Great Q&A here - very clear and helpful. Now let me expand the question to H2 tags. If I keep the H1 as a proper heading on a page, but embed an H2 tag in a sentence is that considered acceptable SEO tactics?
Here's the example - as the 3rd paragraph of a page:
If you’re interested in
commercial landscaping design
, we’re the ones to call. Call us at 1-866-236-7263 or contact us by email.
What do you think?
-
Ok, now I understand what you meant
I agreee, In my opinion that's not a good way to use an H1 tag.
It would still work for rankings but I would also consider it as trying to cheat google.
It's always better to look at the sentence and restructure it and make it more of a selling copy text, for example:
The largest SEO community!
SEOmoz Pro combines campaign-based monitoring, actionable recommendations, and premium access to the web's largest seo community <a href="">- try it free for 30 days!</a>.
/ Gustav
-
Hey Gustav, thanks for the response. As a quick follow up for clarity on my end. Here's an example of what I was referring to using the SEOmoz home page as an example again. Would it be okay from your perspective to do the following?
SEOmoz Pro combines campaign-based monitoring, actionable recommendations, and premium access to the web's largest
SEO community
- try it free for 30 days.
Again, assuming that primary keyword for SEOmoz is "seo community." To me this is an effort to try and fool Google into thinking that SEO community is your top-level heading when in reality it's just a section of a sentence. Would you agree?
-
Hi! to specify: Yes, the words in the H1 tag matters
-
Hi!
The H1 is always important, I've tried several test with the h1 and title tag to see if the correlation still works and improve rankings. In my experience it does.
As long as you don't use css to modify the h1 so that another element of the text below is actually bigger or resemble an h1 it should be fine. Don't try to fool Google by changing the appeareance of the h1 to much(use common sense), remember you can always use an H2 tag below if it makes the content better.
Remember the H1 should always be unique for the page and should not be the same on several pages.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Should I Use WooCommerce Tags & Attributes?
I'm helping an online furniture store search engine optimize a WooCommerce store and I'm trying to make sure our taxonomies make sense. I'd love any help you guys can give, but I'm particularly interested in determining whether we should use tags. Product attributes make sense to me, but I'm concerned to use tags because of the propensity for creating duplicate content. Thanks in advance for any help you guys are willing to give.
On-Page Optimization | | cbizzle0 -
H1 tag- on home page - what is it best to include
is it best to have in the H1 tag 1. just our website address 2. combination of website address followed by short keywords about our website
On-Page Optimization | | CostumeD0 -
What are "stop" words in Title Tags?
My client is following his GoDaddy SEO Checklist, and it is reporting 5 errors in Title Tags, saying the Titles contain "stop" words. I can't figure out what these are. Any ideas?
On-Page Optimization | | cschwartzel0 -
How to separate your - keywords - and | Brand name in the Title Tag
I have traditionally used hyphens (-) and vertical bars (|) to separate out keywords/brands in title tags. A client has asked if other characters will work such as tilde (~), apersat (@), forward slash (/) etc. Are there any special characters we should steer clear of?
On-Page Optimization | | Switch_Digital0 -
Same H1 tag in header across entire site
Should I have the same H1 tag in my header through out my entire site? Or is this considered to be self canalization for my main keywords. For example right now I have an H1 tag with my main targeted keywords on every page on my site, even if the pages content doesn't necessarily match the keywords in the H1 tag.
On-Page Optimization | | TRICORSystems0 -
Title and Heading Tags
Firstly I would like to comment on how helpful this site is. I haven't posted much before but have been reading tonnes of answers for many months now and have been finding it really useful. I used the SEOmoz scanner and the main problem highlighted was duplicate content so I started to add 'customer product reviews' I had received and unique 'further information' to each page (hopefully this was the right thing to do to solve duplicate content! : ) ) Then I looked at heading and title tags. Currently I set title tags for each product page to be "Brand Name- Product Name" but after doing some research we are thinking of putting Keyword Description of Product | Product Name | Brand Name (around 60 characters long). So is this the advised thing to do and create unique titles that are relevant to each specific product page for over 200 pages we have? In addition, any advice on setting optimum tags would be great. We keep reading varying tips online. I gather ideally h1 needs to be a shorter keyword rich version of the title tag? Many Thanks
On-Page Optimization | | jannkuzel0 -
How long should anchor text be? Best practice for anchor text length?
site: http://www.cerritosnissan.com/index.htm On the bottom of this homepage there is an seo content area, basically right under where it says "orange county nissan" welcomes you. The internal links in this area are very long and I'm wondering why they would do this - is there any benefit to making anchor text longer? The longer the anchor text, the less each part of that anchor text passes link juice. For example, for a page about their reviews, the anchor text of the link is "See what Cerritos Nissan customers have to say about their experience at this great Orange County Nissan Dealership.". If I would have done this the anchor text would be "Cerritos Nissan Reviews" or just plain "reviews" as the anchor text. Why would they be using such long keywords as anchor text?
On-Page Optimization | | qlkasdjfw
0 -
Using commas in the title tag?
Is there a disadvantage/advantage to using commas to separate words in the title tag. Which will be more effective as a title tag: "keyword1 keyword2 - Brand" OR "keyword1, keyword2 - Brand"?
On-Page Optimization | | Audiohype0