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.
How Many Characters in an H1?
-
Hi,
How long can the text within an H1 tag area be? Should it ideally be 1-2 words or can it be a full sentence? Or more?
-
There's no technical limitation to the length of heading tags (h1, h2 etc) as they're not displayed anywhere other than on the content page. (Unlike the meta-title attribute, for example, that gets truncated on the Search Results page if it's too long.)
Make it just long enough and no longer
What I mean by that is - write it as a heading that clearly communicates the nature of the page it's introducing, but don't waste words. The more words in the header, the less your targeted words will stand out - both to search engines and to users. So cut down on stop words (the, and, if, because etc) and try to get your primary words close to the beginning of the heading if possible.
But as Stefan says - make sure it makes the visitor want to keep reading - otherwise your SEO efforts have been wasted.
-
Rule of thumb, the h1 heading should describe the paragraph / content below it (in not more than one sentence). For the next headings you could use the h2 tag.
Write for the users. Of course you should pick the right words / phrases people use when they search.
Make the headings compelling encouraging the user to keep on reading
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
-
H1 and Schema Codes Set Up Correctly?
Greetings: It was pointed out to me that the h1 tags on my website (www.nyc-officespace-leader.com) all had exactly the same text and that duplication may be contributing to the very low page authority for most URLs. The duplicate h1 appears in line 54-54 (see below) of the home page: www.nyc-officespace-leader.com: itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/LocalBusiness" style="position:absolute;top:-9999em;"> <span<br>itemprop="name">Metro Manhattan Office Space</span<br> <img< p="">But the above refers to schema" so is this really duplicate H1 or is there an exception if the H1 is within a schema? Also, I was told that the company street address and city and state were set up incorrectly as part of an alt tag. However these items also appear as schema in lines 49-68 shown below: Dangerous for me to perform surgery on the code without being certain about these key items!! Could ask my developer, however they may be uncomfortable considering that they set this up in the 1st place. So the view of neutral professionals would be highly welcome! itemprop="address" itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/PostalAddress">
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingalan1
<span<br>itemprop="streetAddress">347 5th Ave #1008
<span<br>itemprop="addressLocality">New York
<span<br>itemprop="addressRegion">NY
<span<br>itemprop="postalCode">10016<div<br>itemprop="brand" itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Organization">
---------------------------------------------------------------------------</div<br></span<br></span<br></span<br></span<br></img<>0 -
Duplicate H1 on single page for mobile and desktop
I have a responsive site and whilst this works and is liked by google from a user perspective the pages could look better on mobile. I have a wordpress site and use the Divi Builder with elegant themes and have developed a separate page header for mobile that uses a manipulated background image and smaller H1 font size. When crawling the site two H1s can be detected on the same page - they are exactly the same words and only one will show according to device. However, I need to know if this will cause me a problem with google and SEO. As the mobile changes are not just font size but also adaptations to some visual elements it is not something I can simply alter in the CSS. Would appreciate some input as to whether this is a problem or not
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Cells4Life0 -
When is Too Many Categories Too Many on a eCommerce site?
We all know that more and more people are increasing the amount of different categories that eCommerce sites have. Say for example, you have over 3,000 different products, all categories contain unique text at the top of each, all of the categories link to each other (so loads on internal linking) and no two categories contain the exact same products. My question is this, is there ever a stage that you could create too many categories? Alternatively, do you think you should just keep creating categories based on what our customers search for?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | the-gate-films1 -
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?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | blankslatedumbo0 -
How Many Images on 1 Page Are Acceptable
Example I have a page with a slideshow of 35 pictures. They are all unique pictures and relevant to the page, have unique alt text, though no captions or description surrounding the images. Page also has a lot of unique written content. Question: is this large nr of pictures potentially overwhelming for search engines and they may think it is spammy and it would be a safer bet to only keep the top 10 pictures on such page? I did review this great whiteboard Friday - http://moz.com/blog/image-seo-basics-whiteboard-friday - and I noticed this at very end: "The other part, and I see this happen a lot especially with bigger clients, is when you put lots and lots of images on one page, like an image gallery, those pages tend to be very hard to get indexed. The reason for that is there's not a lot unique textual content. A lot of times it's just overwhelming to users. It doesn't provide a lot of benefit in a search result." My page has been indexed, but will ranking potentially be hurt and to play it safe I better reduce nr of pictures? I do understand the "do what is best for the user" scenario and that is what I am doing with a lot of amazing original pictures not found on any other website. However, with search engines we obviously have to consider how they operate as well. Thank you
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | khi50 -
Exact match Title and H1 tags, and over optimization
Hi Mozzers - was just wondering whether matching H1 and Title tags are still OK, or whether there's an over optimization risk if they exact match?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | McTaggart0 -
How many time should a keyword be used in the body of text?
We employee an outside agency to write content for our website as we do not have the ability in house to write unique and good quality content. They have just sent an article which is around 300 words. I told them the keyword phrases to use. When I got the document there is only 1 instance of the keyword phrase(s) in it. Now there seems to be a conflict here amongst posts I have read and general SEO advise as to how many times it should be present (SEOmoz indicates 4 times for instance), our outside agency says it doesn't matter. Now if I have a page optimised for 2 keywords this starts making things tricky and probably looks keyword stuffed to the reader. Assuming the keywords are present once in meta tags, H1, meta descriptions and alt text, what do people think is best practice taking into account recent panda updates? Thoughts appreciated. Thanks Craig
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Towelsrus0