Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Is using a subheading to introduce a section before the main heading bad for SEO?
-
I have noticed a popular trend in web design which involves sections of content being started with what looks to be smaller sub heading something like
<h3>
,<h4>
or<h5>
and then followed by a bigger heading<h2>
.My question is, what is the best way to deal with this visual structure and will having a structure like this hurt your SEO?
<h5>Contact Us</h5> <h2>Get started with your next project in minutes!<h2> <p>Some text here ...</p>
Here are some examples where the header structure is similar to above (smaller before bigger):
If that structure is bad for SEO, then it seems like a simple solution is to make it purely visual, mimicking a sub header with styling on a span or paragraph like these sites do:
- https://www.andrejilderda.nl/
- https://nightwatch.io/
- https://www.swingvy.com/
- https://www.figma.com/
My only concern with that approach is because your section sub heading is no longer an actual header you will miss out on ranking important and relevant keyword information for that section. Is this correct something to be worried about?
There is one last solution I stumbled upon that involves using headings for both but in reverse hierarchy so a
<h3>
is first but styled to be smaller, followed by a visually bigger<h4>
which provides the addition context.Anyone have thoughts, expertise or resources on the matter?
-
You will also find that you fail some accessibility standards (WCAG) if your heading structure tags are out of sequence. As GPainter pointed out, you really want to avoid styling your heading structure tags explicitly in your CSS if you want to be able to to style them differently in different usage scenarios.
Of course, for your pre-headings, you can just omit the structure tag entirely. You don't need all your important keywords to be contained in structure tags.
You'll want, ideally, just one H1 tag on the page and your most important keyword (or semantically related keywords) in that tag. If you can organize the structure of your page with lower-level heading tags after that, great. It does help accessibility too, just note that you shouldn't break the hierarchy by going out of sequence. But it's not a necessity to have multiple levels of heading tags after the h1.
-
Hello there,
Thee way i recommend doing is the next one.
H1 (one per page)
H2 (Name of the section, for example How to improve SEO)
H3 (Linkbuilding . it connects to the H2 of "how to improve SEO")
H3 (Blog post. it connects to the H2 too)
H3(Guest posting)and so on... Never never use more than an H1 on the same page and don't overused H2 as well.
I hope it's clear, let me know if i can help youy with something else.
-
Hey there, The best way (and the way I look at it) is like a book. The title of your page is the title, then from there you have chapters (H1) then perhaps sub-chapters (h2) and so forth. Each is relevant in how it breaks down but also wouldn't work the other way around so much.
Some developers are a tad lazy and they will code the size of an h tag so when creating the page instead of actually coding it to match a design they may well use the h tags to help as it 'looks' right but then you may be internally screaming at the way it works over the look. Welcome to SEO where you may be stuck between design and development!
H1 is 'meant to be more powerful and shouldn't be overused on a page as per the chapter guide I said use it sparingly but with more things SEO there is no golden rule and it's all little tweaks. Overall I wouldn't say its 'bad' just not 'optimized'.
Hope that helps or at least gives you something to think about.
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
-
The main navigation is using JS, will this have a negative impact on SEO?
Hi mozzers, We just redesigned our homepage and discovered that our main nav is using JS and when disabling JS, no main nav links was showing up. Is this still considered bad practice for SEO? https://cl.ly/14ccf2509478 thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ty19861 -
Kind of duplicate categories and custom taxonomy. Necessary, but bad for SEO?
Hello Everyone! I'm new here! My husband and I are working on creating a website: https://sacwellness.com .The site is an online therapist directory for the the Sacramento California area. Our problem is this: In wordpress our category system is being used for blog posts. Our theme is using a custom taxonomy system to categorize different therapist specialties, therapeutic approaches, etc. We've found ourselves in a position where our custom taxonomy and categories are near duplicates. for example we have the blog categories: ADHD counseling, Anxiety therapy, and Career counseling our corresponding custom taxonomy/therapist categories are: ADHD, Anxiety, and....(oops) career counseling. My understanding is that google doesn't see a difference between identically named categories and custom taxonomies and will so choose one to rank and disregard the other, effectively leaving you competing against yourself. is this true in a case like this? Can google maybe understand the difference because of the custom taxonomy and/or URL paths? if this is a problem is it ok to have near duplicates....like ADHD vs. ADHD counseling. This has been our solution so far....but now we're questioning it....derp x_x. I thought about tagging the categories with no index, but I think the archive pages would be useful for people. Essentially we have 2 sets of archives for each keyword. One is for blog posts, and one is for therapists who work with that particular issue along with the 6 most recent blog posts in that category.....because we are putting the 6 most recent blog posts at the bottom of the therapist pages I feel like it wouldn't be as terrible of a loss if we had to noindex the category pages. ....what do you think? Thank you!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | angelamaemae0 -
SEO for multiple languages [Arabic]
Hello all, I am currently managing a Marketplace that comes in two different languages: English & Arabic. The English website is, fortunately, doing quite well in terms of SEO performances but, not the Arabic one. The website has two kinds of content: Static content: controlled by me. It includes menu items, navigation, static pages etc which is properly translated among the two languages User-uploaded content: It includes ads/news posted by the user which may not be translated to Arabic if they chose not to do it. Now if somebody goes to the Arabic website and check a news item that doesn't have an Arabic translation, it will show the English title. I am assuming, serving content in a different language that is specified in the hreflang is a straight no, right?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MozammilStorat0 -
Double hyphen in URL - bad?
Instead of a URL such as domain.com/double-dash/ programming wants to use domain.com/double--dash/ for some reason that makes things easier for them. Would a double dash in the URL have a negative effect on the page ranking?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CFSSEO0 -
Is .ME domain is effective in SEO ?
I am always listening about TLD. com. org .net but what about the .me domain. Can this will be effective in SEO. Can i able to beat down my competitors, if i choose .me . I also have a .com or other TLD option but if i am making my name than .me is for me but i need your suggestion for the seo purpose. Is there really domain affective in term of SEO.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | pnb5670 -
Using Folkd for Video Backlink
Hi Mozzers, What are your thoughts on using www.folkd.com for video SEO? We have a few company videos and would like to possibly get a backlink by either embedding one of our youtube videos on our site or self hosting the video. Are bookmarking sites like this spammy?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Travis-W0 -
Changing Servers + Effect on SEO
Hi, I am currently with a very slow server. Our website takes quite a while to load, FTP is very slow and content changes with Wordpress are slow because even the database connection takes a lot of time. However, my website ranks very well. Traffic has doubled in the last year. Our domain has been registered with this company for over 10 years. I am wondering if changing to a different hosting provider would have an effect on my rankings due to the change in IP.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MangoMan160 -
Are dropdown menus bad for SEO
I have an ecommerce shop here: http://m00.biz/UHuGGC I've added a submenu for each major category and subcategory of items for sale. There are over 60 categories on that submenu. I've heard that loading this (and the number of links) before the content is very bad for SEO. Some will place the menu below the content and use absolute positioning to put the menu where it currently is now. It's a bit ridiculous in doing things backwards and wondering if search engines really don't understand. So the question is twofold: (1) Are the links better in a bottom loading sidemenu where they are now? (2) Given the number of links (about 80 in total with all categories and subcategories), is it bad to have the sidemenu show the subcategories which, in this instance, are somewhat important? Should I just go for the drilldown, e.g. show only categories and then show subcategories after? Truth is that users probably would prefer the dropdown with all the categories and second level subcategories, despite the link number and placement.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | attorney1