We recently had a client contact us about doing a technical audit. One of the things we highlighted to them was that they had multiple H1s on a page and the importance of only having 1 H1.
Having only one H1 is important. It’s basically the heading of the page. What the page is about. Another way of looking at it as a novel. You only have one title – what the book is about.
You might have a sub-heading on the cover of the book – this would be an H2.
This should be the same for your web pages. If you have other important headings on your page, these should be H2,3 and 4s.
Also not correctly tagging your page can be just as bad.
If you’re using a CMS like WordPress it’s very simple. Usually, the blog title is the H1 which is correct. However, for some reason, it does allow you to choose multiple H1s.
If your still using HTML4 or older then it’s very important you only use 1 H1 on the page. While HTML5 will allow you to use multiple H1s it’s still not recommended. There are examples where people have used multiple H1s on the page – but then you’re really relying upon Google and other search engines to determine the true H1. Do you really want to leave it to chance?
The great thing about using a tool like DeepCrawl to crawl your site is that it highlights pages with multiple H1s. While it might not have been you who added the additional H1 tags, but it’s your responsibility to sort them out.
Keep it simple and think of it like a book or newspaper.
- 1 H1 – this is what the page is about.
- H2 – Key chapters – can have multiple of these
- H3 – key sections of the key chapters – can use multiple H3
- H4 and H5s – can use multiple of these and think of these like paragraph titles.
I am the Managing Director of Coreter Media and have been in Digital Marketing since 2009. Initially in-house working for some of the UK’s biggest brands, but now I run my own agency helping small businesses grow.