Does it matter what text you wrap in an H1 tag?
-
Typically H1 tags are reserved for page headings, i.e. on a blog post the blog post title is very often the pages H1, or top-level heading as the W3C puts it.
On the SEOmoz home page they currently have "SEO Software." as their H1 tag, which seems perfectly reasonable and to me fits the W3C criteria.
However, what if the primary keyword for SEOmoz was "seo community" so they decided to wrap just those two words in the sentence that follows on their home page and maintain the existing style of the words "seo community" with CSS. (see attachment)
Are there any arguments against doing that?
Would Google be able to detect this? If so, would Google care?
I do believe the overall importance of the H1 tag has lessened to a degree, however I still believe they are valuable to an extent and would love to hear anyone's thoughts.
-
The same H1 rule goes for all other headers.
Headers are headers, mixing them in with the text content isn't very helpful in a user perspective.
A quick tip is to try to add questions to the h2 to keep the text SEO and user friendly.
So let's rephrase this into a h2 question:
Interested in commercial landscaping design?
We're the ones to call!
Call us at 1-866-236-7263 or contact us by email.
Hope I could help
Best,
Gustav
-
Great Q&A here - very clear and helpful. Now let me expand the question to H2 tags. If I keep the H1 as a proper heading on a page, but embed an H2 tag in a sentence is that considered acceptable SEO tactics?
Here's the example - as the 3rd paragraph of a page:
If you’re interested in
commercial landscaping design
, we’re the ones to call. Call us at 1-866-236-7263 or contact us by email.
What do you think?
-
Ok, now I understand what you meant
I agreee, In my opinion that's not a good way to use an H1 tag.
It would still work for rankings but I would also consider it as trying to cheat google.
It's always better to look at the sentence and restructure it and make it more of a selling copy text, for example:
The largest SEO community!
SEOmoz Pro combines campaign-based monitoring, actionable recommendations, and premium access to the web's largest seo community <a href="">- try it free for 30 days!</a>.
/ Gustav
-
Hey Gustav, thanks for the response. As a quick follow up for clarity on my end. Here's an example of what I was referring to using the SEOmoz home page as an example again. Would it be okay from your perspective to do the following?
SEOmoz Pro combines campaign-based monitoring, actionable recommendations, and premium access to the web's largest
SEO community
- try it free for 30 days.
Again, assuming that primary keyword for SEOmoz is "seo community." To me this is an effort to try and fool Google into thinking that SEO community is your top-level heading when in reality it's just a section of a sentence. Would you agree?
-
Hi! to specify: Yes, the words in the H1 tag matters
-
Hi!
The H1 is always important, I've tried several test with the h1 and title tag to see if the correlation still works and improve rankings. In my experience it does.
As long as you don't use css to modify the h1 so that another element of the text below is actually bigger or resemble an h1 it should be fine. Don't try to fool Google by changing the appeareance of the h1 to much(use common sense), remember you can always use an H2 tag below if it makes the content better.
Remember the H1 should always be unique for the page and should not be the same on several pages.
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
-
Changed Blog Name - Duplicate Title Tags - Wordpress
Hi friends, I changed my blog name url from "german-shepherd-blog" to "dog-blog." Now I am getting a large amount of duplicate title tags. How do I tell google I made the change? Is there something on my site I need to change?
On-Page Optimization | | Joshlaska0 -
H1 tag in wordpress
Hi there! I'm having problems to locate the h1 tag in wordpress (in each page) in order to optimize the pages for SEO. When introducing text it starts with h2. Where can I locate it? Thanks in advanced.
On-Page Optimization | | juanmiguelcr0 -
Content in forum signatures being spidered, does it matter?
Hello, first post here, just started with SEOmoz so hope it's relevant. Searched a fair bit on this without getting a good answer either way so interested to get some opinions. The core of the site I run is a forum dedicated to collecting, for the sake of argument let's say cars. A good percentage of the users have signatures which list their collection, for example 1968 Car A - 1987 Car B - 1998 Car D and so on.... These signatures lists can be 20 items or more, some hotlink the signautres back to the relevant post on the forum, some not. The signatures show on every post on which the user makes. What I'm noting is a) SEOMoz is reporting a LOT of links on every forum page, due mainly to these signatures I guess. and of more interest b) The content of the signatures is being spidered. So for example of you search for '1968 Car A' you might get a couple of good results directly relevant to '1968 Car A' from my site, but you also get a lot of other non-relevant threads as results because the user just happens to have posted on them. Obviously this is much more apparent on the site google search. So what is the best approach? Leave as is? Hide the signatures from the BOTs? Another approach?
On-Page Optimization | | rutteger0 -
The actual title tag is different from the one showing in SEOmoz
Hello all I was looking at the crawling report for my project, I have noticed that there are so many duplicate titles in the "Duplicate Page Title" report, I checked the title tag for one of the titles (for this page) manually (in the page code), and it was showing like this: <title></span><span>Interviews | TechSparks</span><span></title> where it's showing in the "Duplicate Page Title" report like this: Interviews | TechSparksEasyRotator Preview Hovering over the tab in the browser shows the title as I mentioned first, and searching Google for this page shows the title like the first one I mentioned too. Do you any clue why that is happening? fUbtXe6 fUbtXe6.png
On-Page Optimization | | MHD0 -
Title tags in duplicate pages
hi there, we have a new ecommerce platform which has just been deployed, and I've been asked to tidy up the onpage SEO. we have employed canonicals across the category and product pages and we now have a nice set of unique product pages my question is - do we need to create the title tags in all of the duplicate non-canonical pages eg www.mysite.com/niceproduct.html (canonical) www.mysite.com/acategory/niceproduct.html (duplicate) Can we leave the duplicate title tag empty and not worry about it, or should we put in a duplicate of the canonical title tag hope the question makes sense! thanks in advance for all help
On-Page Optimization | | k3nn3dy30 -
Title Tag length and UTF-8
Hello seomozers! Today I've come to one interesting question about Title Tag lenght in UTF-8 coded content. It's relevant to description tag lenght too. So, as we all know SEO best practices recommend that my Title tag should be under 70 (or 75) characters. Now, we have a website which is UTF-8 coded. That means that our special characters (some lithuanian letters) at the end gains +4 or +5 characters in length. So Google Webmaster Tools in our case report that some Title Tags are longer than they should be (exceeded by those +4 or +5), but in SERPs we see clear and not trunctated Title Tags (which means that our title tags are displayed correctly in UTF-8). The question is - should I believe in SERPs and don't take any action or maybe should I notice Google Webmaster Tools recommendations and shorten those tags ? Well, I do believe that at the end it's not so important, but I'd like to hear some more opinions on this simple situation.
On-Page Optimization | | jkundrotas0 -
Meta description tags & title tags duplicate content?
Although meta description tags have no impact on rankings - can there be a negative effect from having many duplicate meta title + description tags with just 1-2 words switched out?
On-Page Optimization | | qlkasdjfw0 -
How impactful will text at the bottom of the page be?
If the most important content for humans on my page is images (e.g., a picture gallery), but there is very little text high up on the page, how impactful will a text description at the bottom of the page be? I've seen a few other sites put content paragraphs at the bottom of their pages. LIke so: http://www.purpletrail.com/invitations-online http://www.tinyprints.com/ Is this something I would do well to emulate?
On-Page Optimization | | Ehren0