Headings and SEO copy
David Rosam on Nov 22 2007 at 11:27 pm | Filed under: SEO copywriting, Search Engine Optimization
Writing for search engines is very like writing for people - or is it the other way round?
One of the things we get asked is about headings - like at our presentation at Start-up Day recently - and how they work with HTML’s
- 1. You should only have one headline on a page because it’s at the top of the your copy hierarchy - use just one heading enclosed in h1 tags. The second and succeeding headings are ignored by the search engines
- 2. Put your most important proposition in the headline because that’s good copywriting practice (it speaks loudly to people) - search engines put most emphasis on headlines, so include one of your key phrases (the one you want to get the most leverage for, if it makes sense within the story you want to tell on the page)
- 3. Break your copy up using subheads. Use those subheads to tell the reader what the page is about and entice them in to read - try to work your other key phrases into subheads between h2 tags.
While search engines are reputed to put some extra weight on a heading between h3 tags, I hardly ever use them. There’s only so much interruption I can tolerate to the flow of my copy. I like simply structured pages.
What’s your view on the use of the h1 tag to surround the company name or logo? For example, WordPress blogs like this one! Subsequent page content headings then start with h2. I see this on a lot of websites but it seems to me to be a bit of a ‘waste’ of h1.
Hi Clive
I wondered if I’d get pulled up on that one!
I think I have an answer. Blogs are blogs and I feel you’re kind of caught by having multiple articles on one page. So you have to use h2 for each of the headlines. You can’t use, say, ten h1s.
However, when it comes to Web sites (ie those that are not blogs), my view is that the h1 tag should be used as a key part of the optimisation. So you shouldn’t use it for the company name.
Do you have any thoughts on how you might be able to avoid the structural gotcha with blogs, so that you can use h1s more productively?
Good point about blogs and h1 usage. I don’t have another answer but I wonder whether our current usage of headings is appropriate considering that h4 to h6 hardly ever get used?
Yeah, can you imagine the volume of copy you’d have on a page to require the granularity offered by all those lower-level tags? :-O
You should use structured headings unfortunately the carry’s very little SEO weight if any extra at all! Hard to believe but true. However I expect well structured headings to help rank sites better in the future as we learn to use them better.
@Johan
Thanks for commenting. But I have to disagree with you.
My experience is that headings, properly used, unquestionably have a positive effect - carry SEO weight, if you will. Their effect is already here.
i agree with david R, my experience also leads me to belueve this also, they are unquestionably a piositive
From an accessibility point of view, I’ve always been inclined to put the website’s name in the h1, so the reader always knows where they are. (Although this information is also in the title tag itself, so will they just hear it twice?)
I find that by considering the benefits to text-to-speech readers (i.e. looking at the page with no styling at all) we are often also doing the thing that is best for SEO. By making the page make sense to a visually impaired user, it will inevitably also make more sense to a search engine spider.
@Pete Hurst
I have no arguments about using h1 tags like that from the accessibility point of view, however, I don’t think it makes much sense from an SEO point of view.
The reason why, is that most sites have little problem ranking well for their own name or their company name, whether it’s put into h1 tags or not. So why not use the h1 tags to give a little more leverage on key phrases that are more difficult to rank highly for?
It’s a choice, most of the time - best accessibility or best SEO?