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?
-
Thanks, Alan. That helps!
-
having the clearer understanding about the concept of having multiple "titles" on a single page (an H1 headline is the in-content "title" for that page), David is correct - while HTML 5 allows multiple H1 tags on a single page, this is bad because the H1 communicates "this is the primary topical focus of this unique page".
Because of that, if you have headlines within the content area for content elsewhere on the site, and link to that other content, then those are absolutely best served with H2 headline tags, or if not , then at the very least, "strong" tags if the topic of each target page is significantly different than the primary topic of the page they're all listed on.
-
Thanks Umar. Article titles (on the article page) should absolutely be h1. My question is specific to article titles on the home page or any category page where there are several articles listed. In that case is
better or ?
-
It is not recommended to have more than 1
tag on a page so using
tags as your article titles might cause an SEO issue when they display on your home page.
Depends on how the site is coded to work but I would say its safer to have the titles as
tags if you are displaying them all on one page and then when the user clicks through to the article it should have a
tag.
-
Hey Kael,
I won't recommend skipping H1/H2 tags for **. These tags have specific purposes and they should be use accordingly. Having H1 as the page/post title shows that what your page will about so it's better to use them.
As for the http://www.muscleandfitness.com, even they are using the H1 in post titles. For example, check out this link:
http://www.muscleandfitness.com/athletes-celebrities/news/jon-stewart-host-2015-summerslam I am not sure in which context your consultant recommended this but I'd love to know the impact of this if he has adopted this approach in past.Hope this helps!
P.S:Sorry for Summer Slam link, I'm a huge WWE fan and can't wait for this Sunday
Umar**
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
-
HELP!!! Steep Drop in Organic Traffic Starting 11/1/16
Starting November 1st, organic web traffic from Google dropped from an average of about 60 visits a day to about 5 per day. So we are more than 90% off!!!! At the end of September, we modified the header of the site to simplify it. We also added a snippet of code to each page to enable Zoho "Sales IQ" to work. Sales IQ enables us to track visitors and engage in chat sessions with them. Apart from that no changes have been made from the site. Any ideas as to what could have caused this drop in traffic? Was there a Google update at that time that could have caused the drop? Or could the recent site changes have caused this? I have attached a Google Webmasters Tool report showing the drop in traffic. I would very much appreciate some insight into this, as all organic traffic to our site has ceased. Thanks,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingalan1
Alan 9VNB1O50 -
How does Googlebot evaluate performance/page speed on Isomorphic/Single Page Applications?
I'm curious how Google evaluates pagespeed for SPAs. Initial payloads are inherently large (resulting in 5+ second load times), but subsequent requests are lightning fast, as these requests are handled by JS fetching data from the backend. Does Google evaluate pages on a URL-by-URL basis, looking at the initial payload (and "slow"-ish load time) for each? Or do they load the initial JS+HTML and then continue to crawl from there? Another way of putting it: is Googlebot essentially "refreshing" for each page and therefore associating each URL with a higher load time? Or will pages that are crawled after the initial payload benefit from the speedier load time? Any insight (or speculation) would be much appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mothner1 -
Blog tags are creating excessive duplicate content...should we use rel canonicals or 301 redirects?
We are having an issue with our cilent's blog creating excessive duplicate content via blog tags. The duplicate webpages from tags offer absolutely no value (we can't even see the tag). Should we just 301 redirect the tagged page or use a rel canonical?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | VanguardCommunications0 -
Philosophy & Deep Thoughts On Tag/Category URLs
Hello, SEO Gurus! First off, my many thanks to this community for all of your past help and perspective. This is by far the most valuable SEO community on the web, and it is precisely because of all of you being here. Thanks! I've recently kicked off a robust niche biotech news publishing site for a client, and in the first 6 weeks, we've generated 15K+ views and 9300 visits. The site is built on the WordPress platform. I'm well aware that a best practice is to noindex tag and category pages, as I've heard SEOs say that they potentially lead to duplicate content issues. We're using tags and categories heavily, and to date, we've had just 282 visits from tag & category pages. So, that's 2.89% of our traffic; the vast majority of traffic has landed on the homepage or article pages (we are using author markup). Here's my question, though, and it's more philosophical: do these pages really cause a duplicate content issue? Isn't Google able to determine that said page is a tag page, and thus not worthy of duplicate content penalties? If not, then why not? To me, tag/category pages are sometimes better content pages to have ranked than article pages, since, for news especially, they potentially give searchers a better search result (particularly for short tail keywords). For example, if I write articles all the time about the Mayo Clinic," I'd rather have my evergreen "Mayo Clinic" tag page rank on page one for the keyword "mayo clinic" than just one specific article that very quickly drops out of the news cycle. Know what I mean? So, to summarize: 1. Are doindexed tag/category pages really a duplicate content problem, and if so, why the heck? 2. Is there a strategy for ranking tag/category pages for news publishing sites ahead of article pages? Thanks as always for your time and attention. Kind Regards, Mike
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RCNOnlineMarketing0 -
Duplicate Title Tags & Duplication Meta Description after 301 Redirect
Today, I was checking my Google webmaster tools and found 16,000 duplicate title tags and duplicate meta description. I have investigate for this issue and come to know about as follow. I have changed URL structure for 11,000 product pages on 3rd July, 2012 and set up 301 redirect from old product pages to new product pages. Google have started to crawl my new product pages but, De-Indexing of old URLs are quite slower. That's why I found this issue on Google webmaster tools. Can anyone suggest me, How can I increase ratio of De-Indexing for old URLs? OR any other suggestions? How much time Google will take to De-Index old URLs from web search?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CommercePundit0 -
What strategies to best use to boost rankings across long-tail articles on site?
Heya! I'm currently engaged in what appears to be a slightly unusual SEO task. I run a large, reasonably well-respected (but not global-standard, yet) site that I'm currently monetising through individual articles targetted at addressing specific search engine queries that I know have decent traffic. It's the EHow / Demand Media model, except with a focus on a single specific (video games) niche, and much, much better quality articles (sufficiently good that they attract a fair amount of praise - all the writers on the site are published authors and the quality's damn high). Most of our articles end up ranking with essentially no backup, but they don't rank high - usually 2nd or 3rd page of Google. I'm trying to determine what the most effective strategy would be for us to boost our article rankings with the least possible expense / effort (we don't have a huge budget). Our long-tail articles are mostly being trumped by articles with either a couple of external links to them or by other articles with no links but from a site with significantly higher Domain Authority (70+ to our 48).I'm working to improve our on-page optimisation, but it's already pretty good (an "A" report from the SEOMoz tools on most or all pages). So, I'm wondering what the best use of our time would be to increase traffic globally across the site. Strategies I'm considering: Focussing on building links to the homepage and to any other pages on the site, by asking for links from community members, doing linkbait articles, directory submissions, guest blogging, and so on. Long-term aim: increase our domain-wide MozRank and MozTrust. Build links to our long-tail articles specifically, most popular first. Get direct links from relevant blogs, press releases, social bookmarking, etc. Long-term aim: get to #1 on Google one page at a time. Something Else? I'm wondering what the big SEO brains here would suggest? Happy to provide additional details if it would help!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Cairmen1 -
Am I keyword stuffing my titles?
I run a site where I answer questions. As I answer each question I choose a title for the page. I have been trying to get good keywords in my titles, but now I am wondering if I have been keyword stuffing them and perhaps I should be more succinct. So, let's say I had a question about a sore back. Here would be the title tag I would use: Why is my back sore? I have spinal pain and need relief and help. | My Main Keyword That's a fictitious example, but the idea is that I would be trying to get the keywords "back", "sore", "spinal", "pain", "relief" "help" and my main website keyword into the title. As I'm writing this I'm seeing the folly in this. I think it would likely be much better to simply have a title of Why is my back sore? So, I have three questions: 1. Is it better to have a succinct title targeting one keyword/keyword phrase than to get lots of keywords in my title? 2. Should I be putting my main keyword after each of my title? Shortly after doing this on 1700+ pages I was #1 for my main keyword. But, I was also doing other things as well to boost my presence for this keyword. 3. If I decide to do more succinct titles, how would you suggest I go about running a test to see which is better? Looking forward to your responses! Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MarieHaynes0 -
WWW vs Non-WWW/Moving a site to a new CMS/Redirect all of the previous URLs
We are working on a new design for a website, which is currently on a CMS that has non-seo-friendly URLs. There is no redirection of 'www' to non-www or vice versa, or handling of homepage redirection so there is only one instance of 'home'. To move the site in the future, all of these URLs will have to be redirected to their new, and I hope, seo-friendly counterparts. Is it prudent now to redirect the four home page links so there is only one? and to redirect all non-www to 'www' so there is only one instance of each page? Or should I leave it and redirect all of them when the time comes?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | haan_seo0