stevenclark.com.au

For the sake of humouring an old fart with a stone in his shoe, could you share your second H1 heading strategy? I mean, if you’re of that school of thought that multiple H1s are valid and therefore perfectly fine, and if you’re of the school that having multiple H1 headings is going to help your SEO, then what exactly do you put into each H1? As I see it, there are two options and both are most obviously not common sense to implement.

Option 1: You have site / company name in your first H1 and then repeat that with the logo – which I’m guessing is your company name?

Option 2: You have site / company name in a H1 and something entirely different, like an article title, as another H1 heading.

First, option 1 offers redundancy which in my opinion would add nothing to the effectiveness of the heading hierarchy and would be the SEO version of my taking a beer whiz into the Great Southern Ocean in the hope of polluting Antarctica as a misguided strategy to affect the quality of Japanese hunted whale on Tokyo supermarket shelves. Rather than saying multiple H1s are valid, I’d suggest first justifying why it should be necessary.

Second, option 2 offers confusion. If every document has a natural heading hierarchy then having two H1s that say different things is complete rubbish. At that point why not make all headings a H1 (I’m being sarcastic, please don’t) and think of it as yelling louder and louder in a crowd trying to be heard over everybody else yelling louder and louder and even louder. Option 2 is, in my humble opinion, indefensible. If a document really does require two H1 headings then you’ve just discovered that you need two seperate documents.

Hierarchies are funny creatures, when you invert your heading hierarchy it should at least have a single root so that it makes logical sense when the document is read. What is important, whether for SEO or accessibility, is that your headings are concise and make sense. Write effective meaningful headings. Then make sure you have high quality content relevant to the headings that precede it. Because Google cares about content, my friends, not about shouting. If SEO were about putting five H1s on a page we’d be rich men and women a long time ago. And people don’t care about five H1s either – we care about understanding and getting the quality information we went to a website to obtain.

So, just out of curiosity, if you’re using multiple H1s in your work could you share your strategy? Do you go with Option 1 or Option 2?

This entry was posted on Sunday, February 1st, 2009 at 9:28 am and is filed under accessibility, rants, web standards. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.