H-tags and Page Name best practice

[AlecPR]

For the past few months I've been working on a new site launch, but have been left with a couple of annoyances from my predecessor.. I've got a couple of questions about best practise (and if it's worth changing now).

For reference, a good example page is http://polestars.net/hen-party/life-drawing-hen-party/

H-tags

The (external) web designer has insisted that wrapping the logo in an H1 tag (with the same branded H1 text on every page), and using an H2 for the actual title of the page is fine. I really don't believe him, but at the same time, feel like maybe google is smart enough to discern the theme of a page in this structure. Is it worth having this changed so that the actual title is the first H1?

Page naming convention

Another annoyance that I've been left with is the fact that every product page is named the same "burlesque hen party", "life drawing hen party", "whatever hen party"... It looks a little weird, but my real concern is that as we now have 60 "hen party" links in the navigation menu of a bunch of our pages, this may be seen as keyword stuffing - is this a real concern, or am I overthinking it?

[AlanMosley]

Google likes a heading but does not insist that it is a H1 tag, but bing does.

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

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

[AlecPR]

Thanks guys...

The 'names' of the pages weren't really my concern, but the fact that the name is used as the anchor text in every navigation menu - meaning that a page might have 100 internal links, and 90 of them contain the anchor text "x Hen Party" -- you don't think this is a big deal?

[DougRoberts]

Totally agree regarding the H1s. They should be used for the main title of an article - not for branding or other "stylistic" reasons. I would definitely recommend making the change.

As for the page naming convention - if the pages have good content (with the broad terms that Vahe suggests) then I don't think it's too much of a problem. After all, I'd expect a page about burlesque hen parties to be called "burlesque hen party"! As long as you're being authentic about it.

[Vahe.Arabian]

Hi Alec,

Answers to your questions:

Heading Tags

The above mentioned is not fine. To get more information about the logo, search engines rely on the alt tag. This has far less value that using a text based H1 tag. If you also think about it, the same logo is being used for every page, so you are essentially using the H1 tag per page.

So yeach page needs to have a unique H1 tag and this needs to be the first title.

Page naming convention

It might be an issues depending on the content and they type of external linking done in the past. I would probably add a secondary kw target, slightly more broad on each page so that it doesn't look keyword stuffed..

Hope this helps,

Vahe