Hey guys! I was looking at adding the H1 tag lower on the page than the H2 tag because I want the top bit to be a call to action. Is this proper practice?

[Web3Marketing87]

Hey guys! I was looking at adding the H1 tag lower on the page than the H2 tag because I want the top bit to be a call to action. Is this proper practice?

[Cyrus-Shepard]

Hi Anton,

Great question! Folks get really caught up in the proper way to use H1 tags and there's a lot of misinformation and rumors out there.

In the old days SEOs discovered that there was a correlation between words in the H1 tag and rankings, and so it became best practice to load all of your keywords there.

As time drew on and Google became more sophisticated, new research by SEOmoz and others discovered that there really wasn't a statistical significance to adding keywords specifically to the H1 tag - in fact the simple use of keywords in a large font towards the beginning of the document worked just as well.

So the best thing you can do for an H1 is the way it was intended - use it as the unique title of the document.

I don't see a problem if this means it's placed after the h2, but I would be wary of placing your most important content further down the page. Google seems to discourage important content pushed too far down the page, but sometimes there's legitimate reasons to place your CTA in a prominent place.

Just make sure your readers can easily find your important content - especially true if you're placing a CTA on every page!

[rightmove]

As long as you know that the h1 tag is the most important to SE's and that it contains the page's most valued keyword then I don't think the structure (h1 before h2) matters. However your proposed structure is semantically incorrect and as we move towards the semantic web, you should adopt stricter structures.