H1 tag proper uses
-
Ok I see this happening all of the time. I get my hands on a new website and there are one of four header tag issues:
1. There are no H1 tags at all
2. There are multiple H1 tags on the same page
3. Every page has an identical H1 tag
4. Header tags are used all out of order
Do any of these have a negative impact on rankings? I've always tried to get one H1 tag on each page, have it be the first header tag, and make it unique to each page. Is this a waste of itme? Could improper header tag use hurt a website?
-
Content, alt tags, anchor text to internal pages are always favorites : )
-
So that means baisicly that the H1 is part of the design session and no longer part (no longer also part )of the SEO sessions.
So is there any on-page SEO element still important for ranking ? as it looks like only content and links from outside sources are the only things that counts.
-
great links
-
Hs have little influence on rankings at this moment. However, as for good writing practice, the use of a single H1 tag as the first Header tag is always recommended for best practice. H1s should not all be the same and should represent the page contents so the reader has a visual cue that (s)he is on the correct page.
-
Latest SEOmoz correlation data showed that h1 use is not a significant ranking factor (or at least not as a significant ranking factor) as once thought. I'll try and dig that up for you.
UPDATE - Here's the links I was thinking of - http://www.seomoz.org/blog/google-vs-bing-correlation-analysis-of-ranking-elements - and - http://www.seomoz.org/blog/whiteboard-friday-the-biggest-seo-mistakes-seomoz-has-ever-made - BONUS - http://www.seomoz.org/blog/bing-vs-google-prominence-of-ranking-elements
Matt Cutts has done a video on this as well - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GIn5qJKU8VM
Basically use the where it makes sense, I try to avoid it in the logo of the page and have just one h1 text header, but there have been times when a couple more may have made sense.
-
Hi Dan,
you can see a Matt Cutts video about this (see the attachment).In my opinion it's better to focus on one H1 per page in order to focus the attention of the crawler on only few main keywords. All H1 have to be different. Take care about pagination, since you can easly duplicate meta tags and H1. In order to avoid it, use the meta FOLLOW,NOINDEX and use the canonical tag.
Luca
-
I have not seen negative impact due to H1 tag as much as I have seen positive. H1 tag optimization used to be popular optimization technique few years ago until lately it has been downgraded in priority by search engines. The top ranking factors are -
-
domain authority
-
link quality and quantity
-
social signals
-
title tag keyword usage
-
Anchor text from backlinks
http://www.seomoz.org/article/search-ranking-factors
Note- Keyword is title is way more important that keyword is H1 tag.
-
-
Good question - I'm also interested in getting an answer on this. I am also trying to get one single h1 tag, unique, on each page.
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
-
Using copy from a current site on a new one
I have a client who is closing down his local business because he'smoving to another state. When he gets there he will launch a new website.On his current website, he put in a lot of work and has a ton of good copy, including blog posts that have helped gain him excellent rankings.He's asking me if he can use that copy on his new site and get original author credit for that, like he did on his current site.Can he use the same copy from his current website on his new websitewithout any problems — and get original author credit for it?Would it be best to shut down the old site or to 301 all of the pages beingmoved to the new corresponding pages?If 301's are the way to go, how long should he leave those in place?Thanks!Kirk
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kbates1 -
Should we use a separate domain for franchise recruitment?
I represent a franchisor and we have two marketing campaigns: attracting customers to purchase our service; and attracting potential franchisees to purchase our business. We're torn between simply putting franchise-related content on our existing consumer website, or building a completely separate website for franchise recruitment. Building a completely separate site would involve a separate SEO strategy to build domain authority and backlinks... so we're thinking the better strategy would be to simply piggyback off of our already existing consumer website. Any advice?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kimberleymeloserpa0 -
H1 tag found on page, but saying doesn't match keyword
We've run a on-page grader test on our home page www.whichledlight.com with the keyword 'led bulbs' it comes back with saying there is a H1 tag, although the content of the keyword apperently doesn't contain 'led bulbs... which seems a bit odd because the content of the tag is 'UK’s #1 Price Comparison Site for LED Bulbs` I've used other SEO checkers and some say we don't even have a H1 tag, or H2, H3 and so on for any page. Screaming Frog seems to think we have a H1 tag though, and can also detect the content of the tag. Any ideas? ** Update ** The website is a single page app (EmberJS) so we use prerender to create snapshots of the pages.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TrueluxGroup
We were under the impression that MOZ can crawl these prerendered pages fine, so were a bit baffled as to why it would say we have a H1 tag, but think the contents of the tag still doesn't match our keyword.0 -
Should I nofollow my Wordpress tags?
I have a website that have a strong root domain (ranking on many terms) but the subpages (articles) doesn't rank well. My feeling is that the linkjuice is not flowing to them (not enough anyway). When I run site:http://mydomain.com I have my root as the first result and the next many results are tagpages on my sites. I have arund 180 index pages, and I need to go to down to result #50 give or take before I see any subpage using the site command. My website theme have the tags on every page possible. The tags are useful for my viewers, but not SEO useful, but I fear that they are dilluting my linkjuice. Should I nofollow and noindex them? Noindex makes sense (the tags are just duplicate content featuring snippets of text from the articles). But Nofollow would make sense too since I wouldn't send any linkjuice through the tags. What would you guys do? Bests regards
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | claus101 -
Duplicate Title tags even with rel=canonical
Hello, We were having duplicate content in our blog (a replica of each post automatically was done by the CMS), until we recently implemented a rel=canonical tag to all the duplicate posts (some 5 weeks ago). So far, no duplicate content were been found, but we are still getting duplicate title tags, though the rel=canonical is present. Any idea why is this the case and what can we do to solve it? Thanks in advance for your help. Tej Luchmun
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | luxresorts0 -
Tagged URL ranking organically
I've noticed that one of our GA tagged urls are ranking organically & therefore is skewing the referral data. The campaign that we were tracking is no longer active but the link still works, but it's going to an old landing page. I asked our developers if we could redirect it but they said that it didn't work. Does anyone have some advise or a solution for this? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Elihn0 -
Is using dots in URL path really a problem?
we have a couple of pages displaying a dot in the URL path like domain.com/mr.smith/widget-mr.smith It displays fine in chrome, firefox and IE and for the user it may actually look better than replacing it by _ or -. Did this ever cause problems to anybody?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lcourse
Any statement from google about it?
Should I change existing URLs? If so, which other characters can I use in the URL instead of underscore and dash, since in our system dash and underscore are already used for rewriting other characters. Thanks0 -
Any penalty for having rel=canonical tags on every page?
For some reason every webpage of our website (www.nathosp.com) has a rel=canonical tag. I'm not sure why the previous SEO manager did this, but we don't have any duplicate content that would require a canonical tag. Should I remove these tags? And if so, what's the advantage - or disadvantage of leaving them in place? Thank you in advance for your help. -Josh Fulfer
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mhans1