h1 in the Header???

[TheDonk]

I would LOVE to hear what a couple of the local SEO gurus think of putting the h1 tag in the header instead of the body. Any benefit? Any negative?

I'm wondering if getting it higher in the code should help, hurt, or have no effect?

[Trikkur]

The latest article I read about H1 Tags said they aren't very relevant anymore.

SEOmoz | SEO Best Practices: SEOmoz's New Policies Based on Updated Correlation Data

Take it for what you will though. I think if you just use H1 tags as they are made for, you will get the best results. I've started reapplying this theory for most of my SEO practices, hopefully it works out well.

[TheDonk]

Good stuff, thanks Jon.

[Michael Martinez]

Ignore the SEOmoz article, as Rand doesn't back up anything he says with any data. His testing methods are not very good, either. He's a great marketer but his technical expertise is severely lacking.

Think of the Hx HTML tag hierarchy as serving two purposes:

First, it provides a logical structure to content that can be broken down into sub-points.

Second, it provides emphasis to whatever text is embedded in it.

Google in particular will determine an emphasis value for text in an Hx header, basing that value on how the rest of the text on the page is emphasized. In other words, they normalize the coding for all Hx headers on a page -- treating them as if they were set to specific font sizes and bolded.

If you are using large fonts and bolding text all over a page, your Hx elements are not going to provide any real emphasis.

As for how the search engines determine rankings, they all claim to use over 200 factors. They all also claim that no one factor normally outweighs any other factors (there would, in fact, be little point to employing such a system).

The Web is a very complex collection of documents.

Some documents emphasize expressions through on-page repetition. Think of a blog or forum where hundreds of comments have been shared, all about the same topic, on one page. People will repeat certain words hundreds of times. That kind of repetition carries considerable weight.

Some documents emphasize expressions through off-page repetition. That is, someone points a lot of links at these documents where the links use the same or very similar anchor text. This is the favored method employed by many people in the SEO industry (although, ironically, it's the least efficient method).

Some documents emphasize expressions through a mixture of on-page and off-page repetition.

Some documents emphasize expressions through on-page formatting: bolding, italicizing, underlining, coloring, quoting, changing font sizes, using Hx elements, etc. All of these standard emphasis techniques are used by the search engines to evaluate the importance of a word to the copy in which it is embedded.

Some documents emphasize expressions through position. This is a more subtle approach and is not generally considered to be effective. Originally, it was believed that the closer to the beginning of the indexable text a word was, the more important it might be deemed by a search engine. Even if the search engines don't work that way, many people structured Web pages this way believing it was a valuable thing to do.

Some documents emphasize expressions through the keywords meta tag, through the title tag, the description meta tag, and the page URL. The major search engines differ on how they handle most of these page elements. For example, only Yahoo! and Ask are known to index what is in the keywords meta tag.

Now, think of all the millions of documents that employ these and other methods of emphasis and then combine them with billions of documents that don't try to emphasize anything (for search engines). You can devise a set of queries to test for all sorts of influences on search results and you can prove or disprove any assumption you want to.

So the SEOmoz article is pretty much a load of hogwash with no scientific value or credibility.

If you really want to know whether you should use Hx headers, ask yourself if a typical visitor to your site would benefit from your use of that kind of emphasis. If the answer is "yes", then you should use them. Otherwise, ignore them.

[GregW]

Nice post Michael!

[TheDonk]

If you really want to know whether you should use Hx headers, ask yourself if a typical visitor to your site would benefit from your use of that kind of emphasis. If the answer is "yes", then you should use them. Otherwise, ignore them.

I appreciate your thoughtful post, but the question wasn't "should I use h tags". The question is "is there an SEO benefit or negative from putting the h1 tag inside the header as opposed to putting it inside the body? I'm wondering if it helps to get the h1 tag higher in the code.

[randfish]

Michael - I think that's very unfair and unreasonable of you to say. Just as I never cast out your criticisms without first reading and attempting to understand your perspective, I believe you owe me the same professional courtesy.

The article states that H1 tags are very poorly correlated with high rankings. The methodology for collection may be something you'd argue with, but our engineers (who have a very good background in statistical analysis) feel very good about it, so I do as well. We're talking about correlation across thousands of search results, and using the keyword in the H1 (or any "Hx" tag) is simply a poor predictor of positive rankings.

That said, our advice in the piece was not "don't use H1 tags," it was simply "be aware that this low correlation exists." There could be many reasons - correlation is not causation, but it does suggest that if you have lots of things you're doing to improve SEO, Hx tags may not be the first area you want to concentrate on.

Please try to be a bit more respectful and less dismissively insulting. It furthers no positive agenda to treat people, organizations and information with such disdain.

To the question asked by TheDonk - we've not tested, but I don't think that technically, it's semantically correct HTML to use an Hx tag outside the body tag. If you find interesting data on this front, we'd certainly be interested to hear it.

[TheDonk]

Welcome to PAL Rand. As far as I'm concerned, I'd love to see you around here more often. We can never get enough SEO info to contemplate, and never enough intelligent opinions.

[Steve20]

The two of you has their own perception regarding this question.

Well, I do consider the Article posted. In some points, the writer says a total fact.

Mr. Micheal, you also have a good point. I do noticed you are one of the quality posters in this forum.

[Tom]

The two of you has their own perception regarding this question.

Well, I do consider the Article posted. In some points, the writer says a total fact.

Mr. Micheal, you also have a good point. I do noticed you are one of the quality posters in this forum.

Another winning post..lol


I have found when I edit my articles to add h1 and h2 tags that were never there, the article will move up in the serps. I also think h1, h2 tags are good for site structure and flow of articles.

I have yet to try them in the header though. Some sites go out of their way to add the h1 tags in the header, it really looks out of place!