H1 tag in the footer?

[travelclickseo]

Quick question:

I have been scouring SEOMoz.org along with webmaster forums looking for an answer, but we have a person who insists that the H1 tag be located in the Footer.

I feel that is is fundamentally wrong because it is not the intent of the H1 tag, and I do not believe it is a best practice.

That being said would we see what little value the H1 tag has disappear if we put it in the footer, would we be penalized, or am I being too vanilla by wanting to keep it in the Title position?

[AlanMosley]

The question is why do it?

Some say that the H1 has little value, but thats not the case, goolge will try to find a heading and i believe SEOMoz test show that using a H1 had lttle benifit over other ways of presenting a header, but all the same a header you should have and the best header is the H1.

Bing on the over hand dose value the H1 tag and sees no H1 tag as a violation. Bing says the H1 is almost as important as the Title tag.

http://perthseocompany.com.au/seo/reports/violation/the-h1-tag-is-missing

It also stats that muliplue use may lead to no indexing, I would not mess with it, expecialy if there is no reason to do so.

http://perthseocompany.com.au/seo/reports/violation/the-page-contains-multiple-h1-tags

[Francisco_Meza]

Sorry! That question was a little funny. I have never heard of the H1 tag in the footer. H stands for Header. Hey, if your guy is persistent, tell him that we would like to see a high ranking website with an H1 in the footer. NOT a good idea.

[donford]

When I was hired on at my company the site had been built with Absolute Positioned Div Layers... that said there were H1 tags at the bottom of the page.. Dreamweaver isn't very friendly about where it puts these types of layers. The site still did fairly well in the ranking despite this..

That said, I wouldn't personally put a H1 tag in the footer, I would want it as close to the body tag as possible. Though given the way AP Div's work you could have a H1 tag next to the body tag and still be in the footer.

[AWCthreads]

Relevant or not, its the first time I've heard of putting an H1 tag in the footer. Perhaps calling it an F1 tag would be more appropriate. Seriously, some would argue the H1 tag has little to no relevance (Rand would probably fall into this category) and therefore some do not use it at all. Todd Malicoat would suggest the H1 tag has some relevance and is a good practice for page structure and keyword instance.

A recent thread among these posts and one I ascribe to is that failing to use an H1 tag is probably not going to hurt you, but using one is certainly not going to hurt you. If it is going to be of benefit to the user in terms of readability and navigation (with an arguable smidgeon of G benefit) go ahead and use it.

That being said, strong keyword copy in the lower block level is good block level distribution. Putting an H1 tag would be irrelevant in my opinion and unorthodox as H1 tags historically have been in the top block.