Heading tag advice

[IanSaunders]

I've no doubt this has been covered before in a number of threads, but there seems to be so many opinions and ideas that I'm getting confused.

I'm quite comfortable with HTML and the heading tags (H1, H2, H3 etc), and I appreciate that I can style them separately within CSS, so their appearance is essentially irrelevant. I also understand their use in semantically determining the importance of the content they mark up. My confusion is aligning this semantic meaning with good SEO practice.

If I have a site, should the site name / logo be within the H1 tag using some kind of image replacement, since this is the top level heading? If so, and if the section title is then within H2, doesn't that relegate product names (arguably the most important piece of information from an SEO perspective) to H3 and below?

What's the best way to approach this?

[leehack]

Having the site name as a H1 would be barmy IMO, that'd mean one of the most important tags you have is the same on all pages. Use the H1 to reflect what's on the page, it's a page centric tag, not a site wide one.

SEO advice is very confusing, some conflicts, some agrees, read it all and use the bits that you think are best to use, creating your own blueprint from other's blueprints. Another thread on the same subject is not going to clear that mess up and just makes it even worse for people following you.

Some good tutorials at the top of this forum too worth a read.

[IanSaunders]

That's kind of what I thought, but semantically, surely the site name is the most important heading - it's like the book title for want of a better analogy.

Would you therefore use a lower ranked heading for the site name (and therefore reverse the order of precedence within the code), or not use a title tag at all - stick it in some generically named div?

And apologies if this thread will confuse anyone. I'm happy to have it deleted when we've finished discussing it if that's preferable...

I'll have a squizz at the tutes.

[Duncan Rounding]

As Lee mentioned H1 headings are page based not site based. You don't want the same H1 heading on every page.

[leehack]

Well if we use your book analogy, when was the last time you needed to know the name of the book on every page you read of that book and more importantly what did it add or how did it help you if you did have that? You're more interested in the chapter name and the story surely if anything at all. Not sure why you'd see a site name as anything to do with semantics.

Once you go anywhere in life, it's very rare you will need to keep being told the place you are in, you are far more likely to be directed to areas or departments within that place, a website is no different.

You're answering your own questions in fact, you said that the product name is the most important thing on the page, yet you are talking about H1ing the site name.

[IanSaunders]

I absolutely agree with you both, if we suggest that heading tags are only there to label the relative 'value' of pieces of data, but hierarchically it makes no sense (to me at least).

If I were to mark up a word document, for instance, there would be a single Title with sub-headings throughout the document. This would then allow the application to build a sensible table of contents with a logical hierarchy throughout.

I'm now coming to the idea, that - hierarchy be damned - do what works for search engines (and I suppose it's my own fault for choosing the search engine forum rather than any other), but it feels awkward.

And I never imagined I'd write the word 'hierarchy' so many times in a single post. We should apply scrabble scores here

[Mike Hughes]

The whole basis of the web is that pages are standalone and the relationship between them just depends on links.

When people look at web pages, they aren't looking at Page 19 of your book. They're looking at one page that has links to and from other pages, including the search engines and other websites.

H1 and similar tags are there to help define the structure of the page. Nothing more.

Mike