Should I use **tags or h1/h2 tags for article titles on my homepage**
-
I recently had an seo consultant recommend using tags instead of h1/h2 tags for article titles on the homepage of my news website and category landing pages. I've only seen this done a handful of times on news/editorial websites. For example: http://www.muscleandfitness.com/
Can anyone weigh in on this?
-
Thanks, Alan. That helps!
-
having the clearer understanding about the concept of having multiple "titles" on a single page (an H1 headline is the in-content "title" for that page), David is correct - while HTML 5 allows multiple H1 tags on a single page, this is bad because the H1 communicates "this is the primary topical focus of this unique page".
Because of that, if you have headlines within the content area for content elsewhere on the site, and link to that other content, then those are absolutely best served with H2 headline tags, or if not , then at the very least, "strong" tags if the topic of each target page is significantly different than the primary topic of the page they're all listed on.
-
Thanks Umar. Article titles (on the article page) should absolutely be h1. My question is specific to article titles on the home page or any category page where there are several articles listed. In that case is
better or ?
-
It is not recommended to have more than 1
tag on a page so using
tags as your article titles might cause an SEO issue when they display on your home page.
Depends on how the site is coded to work but I would say its safer to have the titles as
tags if you are displaying them all on one page and then when the user clicks through to the article it should have a
tag.
-
Hey Kael,
I won't recommend skipping H1/H2 tags for **. These tags have specific purposes and they should be use accordingly. Having H1 as the page/post title shows that what your page will about so it's better to use them.
As for the http://www.muscleandfitness.com, even they are using the H1 in post titles. For example, check out this link:
http://www.muscleandfitness.com/athletes-celebrities/news/jon-stewart-host-2015-summerslam I am not sure in which context your consultant recommended this but I'd love to know the impact of this if he has adopted this approach in past.Hope this helps!
P.S:Sorry for Summer Slam link, I'm a huge WWE fan and can't wait for this Sunday
Umar**
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
-
Homepage only has disappeared from SERPs
I have a website that has been ranking really well with the home page for our most important keywords. 2nd position. A few days ago I noticed the home page was nowhere to be found in the SERPs. Not really knowing what to do I republished my Rapidweaver site and got the message that there were two index files. An index.html and index.php file which could cause problems. The home page has always been a html page so I have no idea how this was created. I deleted the php file from the file directory and resubmitted the homepage in webmaster tools for indexing. Within about half an hour the page was appearing in the SERPs again in my original position for the important keywords. Two days later and it's gone again. I've tried everything I can think of and resubmitted the page to Google for indexing. I can see it is being indexed as it comes up when I type the URL into the search bar but it will not come up in the search results either for my two keywords or the actual name of my business. When I type in business name it brings up lots of other pages from the site but not the home page. I've spoken to 3 SEO companies and nobody knows what is causing it. Please help with any suggestions this will definitely impact our business if we can't figure it out. Has this happened to anyone else? My website is NSFW but is www.aprilnites.com.au
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | GemmaApril0 -
How to rank for a location/country without having a physical address in that location/country
How do I go about it if my physical address (office) is in Country A but I want to rank my website in Country B, C and D (without having an office or physical address in the countries B, C and D)? I am aware of people setting up virtual offices in other countries/cities and adding them to Google Places/Maps with toll free phone numbers, but I don't wish to do any of that. I know Google will catch up with this one day or the other and punish me hard for trying to play games with it. Is there a way rank a website in another country without actually having a physical location there? If yes, please guide me how to go about it.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | KS__0 -
Why is google truncating my title tag?
We are trying to figure out why the search result for the term "au pair" is not matching our designated title tag or anything on our page. If you search "au pair", please see the result for the domain interexchange.org. We do not see this problem with other search terms.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jrjames830 -
Does anyone know how to appear with snippet that says something like: Jobs 1-10 of 80 in the beginning of the description on Google? e.g. like on: https://www.google.co.za/#q=pickers+and+packers
Does anyone know how to appear with snippet that says something like: Jobs 1-10 of 80 in the beginning of the description on Google? e.g. like on: https://www.google.co.za/#q=pickers+and+packers Any markup that could be used to be listed like this. Why is some sites listed like this and some not. Why is the adzuna.co.za page listed with Results 1-10 while some other with Jobs 1-10 ?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | classifiedtech0 -
Will Google read my page title and H1?
Dim strTitle : strTitle = "The Title Of My Page" <title>Company name - <%=strTitle%></title> <%=strTitle%> Will Google be able to read this? When I view source the relevant information is in the tags but I'm wondering if Google hates this or not? Cheers!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Hughescov0 -
Title Attribute for H2 & h3 Tag SEO Question
Hi , We have an eCommerce Site and from looking at a competitor , they seem to be rank better than us even though our everything about our site is better . We hire the same products (are affiliated the same company) so the product list is the same. Both our category pages score A grade in Seomoz reports. So This is what I can deduce from the competitors category page I am trying to compete against. On the cement Mixer hire category page The competitor has put the Main Keyword "Cement mixer hire" in all the Title Attributes on their H2 and H3 tags as well as it being the main H1 tag. They have 5 product links in h3 tags all with the same title attribute (cement mixer hire) These links go through to product page. Am I missing a trick here ?..... I would have though using the title attribute so much for main keyword would be a bit spammy ?. I have copied them with the point 1 but I have not done mine h3 as yet. Just wondering that the SEO guru's thought ?. thanks Sarah
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SarahCollins0 -
Homepage Content
I have a website which perform very well for some keywords and much less for other keywords. I would like to try to optimize the keywords with less performance. Let's say our website offers 2 main services: KEYWORD A and KEYWORD Z. KEYWORD Z is a very important keyword for us in terms of revenue. KEYWORD A gives us position Nr 1 on our local Google and redirect properly the visitors to xxxxxx.com/keyword-a/keyword-a.php KEYWORD Z perform badly and gives us position Nr 7 on local Google search. 90% Google traffic is sent to xxxxxx.com/keyword-z/keyword-z.php and the other 10% is sent to the home page of the website. The Homepage is a "soup" of all the services our company offers, some are important (KEYWORD Z) and other much less important. In order to optimize the keyword KEYWORD Z we were thinking to make a permanent redirect for xxxxxx.com/keyword-z/keyword-z.php to xxxxxx.com and optimize the content of the Homepage to ONLY describe our KEYWORD Z. I am not sure if Google gives more importance in the content of the homepage or not. Of course links on the homepage to other pages like xxxxxx.com/keyword-a/keyword-a.php will still exists. The point for us is maybe to optimize better the homepage and give more importance to the KEYWORD Z. Does it make sense or not?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | netbuilder0 -
Which domain should I use?
I own a couple domains that are specific to a product and would like to know which one folks on here recommend. Primary Google Search Term Example: "Tax Bond" Example Domain 1: www.taxbonds.net Example Domain 2: www.tax-bond.net I've done research on here before and have come to the conclusion that hyphenated domains aren't bad (no more than 2 hyphens though). So, do I go for the EXACT search term with the hyphen or do I go for the pluralized search term without the hyphen, even though most people will not add the "s" in the Google search? Thanks, Alex
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | dbuckles0