Can I place H1 tag anywhere on page

[mullsey]

Hello,

For those of you who use Magento you will know it is not SEO friendly.

When you create a category or product, the name of the product or category then becomes the H1 tag.  We sell mens business shirts.  For example we have a product called 'White poplin classic fit' this is also the H1 tag, nobody is ever going to search for that term so I have had my developer create a new attribute that allows me to keep the product name as it is and let's me create a new SEO friendly H1 tag, for example 'White business shirt'  However, placing 'White business shirt' on the page to be visible by the visitor does not look good on the page.

My question is.  Can I place the H1 tag anywhere on the page?  I have some tabs like below.  I am thinking of add a tab in between delivery and returns called more info and placing more seo keywords including the H1 tag in this tab.

Will this be OK or will this be seen as black hat technique?

[Anthony_NorthSEO]

I've been developing in Magento for several years, and I can tell you without a doubt that it's better to keep the H1 tag wrapped around the actual product name on your product pages. This should be default on all pages except the home page, where the H1 is wrapped around the IMG ALT for the logo in the header. I prefer to move the H1 on the main page so that it wraps actual relevant text, but it requires a little bit of editing of the Magento core, and like everyone has said, heading hierarchy doesn't count for much in Google's algorithm these days.

The best way to add specific keywords for product-level pages in Magento is via the Short Description, General Description, and the Product Tags. Tags are likely the most effective solution, as this functionality was designed for customers to make notes about products, so "White Business Shirt" would look natural there and make perfect sense.

You might also try very minimal internal linking from your homepage if you have a specific product you're attempting to boost your SERP ranking for. Something like "Our best selling <  a h r e f = product url  >business shirt<  /  a >."

To be honest, there's so many factors involved in correctly optimizing a Magento-based site, I'd recommend not wasting your time with H tags at all, especially masking and duplicating them.

You'll be much better off if you concentrate on optimizing your category hierarchy, writing unique product descriptions, dealing with duplicate content, configuring robot instructions, decreasing load times, etc...

Plenty to do... no need to mess w/ the H1 tag.

Hope this helps & good luck!

-Anthony

[bronxpad]

Like everyone stated, the h1 tag is not the make or break issue for sep. But it is part of your overall on site seo things to consider. You should normally place the h1 tag first and then followed by the h2 then 3 and so on. If you wanted to have another group of text larger than the h1 tag then simply use CSS to do this or an inline span.

[RyanKent]

Hi Jason,

I am going to make a guess that you are proceeding under a false assumption. It seems you believe that Google will automatically weigh the H1 tag with a given weight and then you can place it anywhere on the page and it will keep that same weight. Please forgive me if I am mistaken.

Take a look at this video: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/whiteboard-friday-the-biggest-seo-mistakes-seomoz-has-ever-made. Rand shared as one of the biggest mistake he has made in the past was pushing clients to replace text in bold with header text.

With the above noted, I would suggest it is still a best practice to use header tags. Google has evolved and header tags is part of semantic markup which is a best practice. I would love to view some testing based on your suggested tactic, but I don't believe it would offer any value. Why?

• Content below the fold is valued less then content above the fold

• Content which requires users to perform extra actions to see such as click on tabs or buttons is likely valued less the content which displays without the need to perform extra actions.

In brief, you are attempting to manipulate the search engine results. There is no real value offered to the user with this technique. There are other approaches you can take which would offer value to users and be authentic. One possibility is to offer a "white business shirt" category page which shows your various products which meet that criteria

[MassivePrime]

First of all I should point out that the H1 tag will not make or break your ranking. It holds very little importance in Google's consideration of your page.

While it is best practice to have it in order to give a title to your article, product etc. I would not hide it in another tab. For one Google does not see your site as humans do, in the source code the H1 tag will appear very low on the page if it's hidden in a tab which brings down the value of having that H1 tag even more.

However the most important thing I'd like to say is this, in your example it appears that you wish to rank for the keyphrase  'White business shirt'. I am assuming that you have more than 1 product page that would fall under this category apart from 'White poplin classic fit'. Does that mean that you wish to optimize all those pages for the same keyword? If the answer is yes I should remind you that you should never target a long tail keyword with more than one page. It might be a good idea to simply optimize the category page for each product line:

Title - (Luxury/affordable/cheap whatever you want) Buy white business shirts

Meta description - A wide range of white business shirts by Jason Muller

H1 tag-White business shirts

• Link to 'White poplin classic fit'
• Link to White poplin medium fit'
• Link ''White poplin large fit'

Some sort of description of what poplin means, the material, the grade of white these shirts are, where they were made, etc.

and the other on-site seo steps we usually take to make Google happy.

This is how we do all our e-commerce SEO and it works great for us, hope this helped.

[SCW]

While I am not familiar with Magento specifically; principal concepts of on-page optimization should hold true.

I wouldn't worry about an exact match (and whether or not someone is going to query that exact term) in your H1 tags, rather, keep your keywords toward the front and even include variants of the page title tag. Similar to the meta description, the H1 no longer contributes a strong search ranking signal, but should definitely be utilized in structuring  taxonomies of information on the site.

For example, if those tabs fall below an H2 or H3 on your page, I wouldn't place the H1 in that position. As a matter fact, I wouldn't place the H1 there, period. As you know, the H1 is meant to be used as a heading tag and to provide a weighted emphasis to content that is to follow. Stick to using the H1 as it was intended to be used and produce copy for your audience.

Perhaps you could have your developer remove the H1 from wrapping your category or product, and instead, parse a configurable H1 attribute as the first line when viewing the information contained "Product Details" tab.

Just an idea...