Heading tags (H1 through to H6) are given more weight by search engines than regular body copy. So they should be used wisely to reinforce the page’s overall keyword theme. The posting date should never be within an H1 tag, because you’re NOT trying to rank well in the engines for a date. Instead, wrap an H1 tag around your category name or tag name on your category page or tag page, respectively. Then make the titles of your blog posts H2 tags, so that on a category or tag page, the category/tag words can be the only H1 on the page and thus can convey greater emphasis than the post titles.
You could even take this idea a step further and make the post title display within an H1 tag if it’s a Sticky post, and within an H2 if a normal post. (See my last post for more on the benefits of Sticky posts for SEO.) Check out this example category page on BusinessBlogConsulting.com where I did just that.
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Hi SEO Leader person,
On my website I noticed that I was using H2 in stead of H1 tags for a heading. Does this mean Google will place less of a priority on my H2 content as their are no H1 tags?
Should I go and convert the code to use H1?
Hi Elton,
H1 tags are better than H2. So I’d say it’s worth doing the conversion. But don’t expect life-changing results out of it.
I’m designing my site in Joomla and I have long articles. The title of the article has the title tag, so I use the h1 tag for the main headings within the article (and then the h2 tag as a subheading, as needed).
Some, like you, argue that you should have one h1 tag per page, but others disagree.
However, since the Title conveys the main point of the article already (i.e., the Heading1), then it seems silly to use h2 for the headings in the article and skip the use of h1.
It also seems silly to tag the title with both the title and h1 tag. Seems like a waste.
Advice?
Hi Stephan, I found your blog on Stumble. Normally I would say “Oh god, not another SEO Blog”. However, as I was just about to say those exact words I saw “The Scattered Wisdom of a scientist turned web marketing virtuoso”.
That angle totally worked, and I plan on reading the rest of you blog. Great job!
Nice article. Definitely want to ensure you have consistency between your title tag, description tag and your H1 tag.
Also, try to extend that consistency to your image alt tags if possible … however, remember to stay far away from keyword spamming … it’ll undo a lot of SEO effort.