H1 H1 H3 Tags

[web design cape town]

h1 h2 h3 tags importance?

can you use the same keywords in all 3 on the same page or should you rather have variables of the keywords within the tags on the sames page?

Does Google recognize these tags like titles, where each h1 tag should be different from page to page to identify a theme for each or can you have the same h1 tag keywords for all your pages? and then just vary your h2 and h3 for theme page specific.

[Toni Anicic]

"h" tags play a big role in the ranking algorithm so they are important.

You should actually have only one H1 tag on a single URL and this is the topic of this page so it should contain your targeted keyword. You can often see that people put title of their website in h1 (logo) but I think that for the rankings, it's much better to serve unique h1's on every page of your website and have your main targeted keyword in it.

Now about using the same keywords in all 3... Yes, you can (and should) use the same words (keywords) but I wouldn't use the same exact phrases. It makes no sense to have a heading, sub-heading and sub-sub-heading with identical content for both usability and SEO reasons.

You can have several h2 tags on the same page as it's used as sub-heading (a subtitle) so you basically use it to split content of a single page into more readable thematic whole.

There are lots of different opinions on use of h3 tag in SEO community. I've seen lots of opinions that h3 shouldn't be used at all. I personaly don't use it unless it makes sence. This means that I have a huge article that needs to be split into sub-headings and sub-sub-headings.

[web design cape town]

I saw a top seo company ranked on google using the h1 tag throughout the home page. Now this confuses me, surely google will either allow/recognise it or not.

Why, if this is not proper seo will this site be on the 1st page of google for such a competitive word like "seo".

Clealry they are not penalized for using the h1 tag so abusively

[Toni Anicic]

They will not penalize you. It's simply better to use it to describe the topic of the single page user is currently at instead of the name of your website / company. The top SEO company you're reffering to probably has the term SEO in it's name and are talking about SEO on every page in their website so the h1 tag is kind of targeting the main keyword of any single page.

[web design cape town]

no, the h1 tag are repeated a few times on the home page

[ericajoieake]

yes, using H1,H2,H3 and so on are very important to show to search engine robots which of your keyword are the most important.

[safdar_ali]

Header tags normally used to define the products or services and it is more important.

thanks everybody for informative post or reply.

[morestar]

ok sure, the site you saw with high rankings and the same H1 tag on each page might be doing ok but probably for other reasons too...

as others are saying, it is generally better to have h1 tags describe each page individually but if that site is still ranking high and has the same H1 tags throughout each page there must be something else they are doing to help them rank...

see, basically google or other search engines aren't going to say "oh hey, their whole site is good, provides good content and is user friendly but we're going to bring their rankings down because each H1 tag on each page is identical"...

it's not in their best interests....

[danielle v2.1b]

My experience is that Google likes semantically coded HTML. If your H1 tells it the start of your theme and you continue that theme throughout well written code with the HTML tags being chosen because they describe what the content actually means, then the site will generally get a good look in. Using the correct tags for purpose should be a good part of making your content accessible to search engines in a meaningful way.

I have seen people use tags excessively like placing h tags around navigation links. My view is that if these sites enjoy a temporary boost in rankings they are also the first to suffer a fall as search engines get progressively better at interpreting the meaning behind data and the intention by which it was put in a certain way. So yes, use H tags with meaning and it will help, just don't overplay the importance of it in your mind. Semantically written code is something you should do as a web designer anyway, especially if you code in XHTML, so this is hardly a hidden rocket booster type of SEO technique.

[morestar]

I have seen people use tags excessively like placing h tags around navigation links. My view is that if these sites enjoy a temporary boost in rankings they are also the first to suffer a fall as search engines get progressively better at interpreting the meaning behind data and the intention by which it was put in a certain way...

I would like to re-visit what I said though, that being that even if the SEs 'get progressively better at interpreting the meaning behind data and the intention by which it was put in a certain way' it does not necessarily mean they will suffer in rankings to any extent.

if the site is user-friendly, provides relevant content to it's visitors and has decent back-links then their going to get good rankings whether or not the place H1 tags within their navigation code or place the H1 tag in all their paragraphs.

IMO