HTML Headings and SEO – The Complete HTML Reference Guide for SEO

Headings are used to structure the contents of a document by specifying a hierarchy of sections. They help creating the document outline for user agents. It’s also helpful to know that H1 heading is one of the most talked and controversial subject among search engine optimization professionals. And that’s for a good reason; the lack of communication with webmasters from search engines leaves room for intense debates. Add accessibility issues next to SEO and you will see why such debates will never end.

Before going into what SEOs, programmers, designers and copywriters should know about HTML headings, let’s go through some of the most common questions about them. For the rest of the article we will mostly refer to H1 as synonym to HTML headings, in general.

Tricky Questions about the H1 tag

First thing everybody needs to know is that, headings play a huge role into the accessibility of your website. Screen readers are looking for H1 to H6 tag to rapidly “jump” blind people within the section of a page. They can “skim” a page by pressing the “H” key to jump/hear from one heading to another. Considering this argument only, you should pay more attention to your document outline and headings.

Below are some opinions:

1. Will multiple H1 hurt my rankings or are they considered spam?

Most likely no. Multiple H1s are acceptable and if you think logically, there are valid reasons for multiple H1 on the same page. For example, WordPress assigns H1 to all post title on the home page. This myth has also been debunked by Matt Cutts, the head of web spam at Google.Keep in mind thou that multiple H1 could trigger spam flags.Contradictory enough, Bing recommends that each page should contain a single H1 tag.

2. Is it ok to have the same H1 on each page of the website?

Yes and No. Again, if you look at the default installation of WordPress you will notice that WP is setting the same H1 on each page, usually, the site name. But this can be good or bad practice, depending on your website theme. We, personally, prefer to put the single most important keywords inside the same H1 on each page to communicate Google what’s the main theme of the website.

3. Is it H1 image replacement in the logo spam, good or bad?

NO, it is definitely not spam, as long as you don’t abuse this technique with keyword stuffing or other crazy stuff. W3C uses image replacement, SEOmoz used to use it before the 2011 redesign, A List Apart does it too, Smashing Magazine also.

Again Bing, suggest in the same document mentioned at questions #1 that each heading should contain only text. So, Bing doesn’t like image replacement? And since it seems to be a very strong similarity between Google and Bing algorithms.

4. Should H1 be the same with

No. Search engines tend to give less importance to HTML tags and attributes which are not visible to the user, because such elements can be abused. You can’t hide the TITLE element on the title bar of the browsers, but you can do that with H1, right? Thinking white hat (where you don’t actually hide H1 content) why would you repeat the same content twice?

5. Is there any correlation between H1 and better rankings?

Yes, but not as much as you think of. Lots of SEO think that H1 has a great impact in rankings, but SEOmoz research claims that there is little positive influence on rankings, as compared to using large font. But, wait! It’s not zero, and if it’s positive then you should take it into consideration.

About the Author

Traian has almost a decade experience in online marketing and he is the founder of Pitstop Media, an SEO Services that provides Internet Marketing Services to SMB clients around the world. For more information visit: http://www.pitstopmedia.com

Author (artsubpsm). Submitted on Wed, 11 May 2011 Time: 12:07 PM

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