Hello,
isn’t it bad for SEO if the title has a lower h-tag heading than the content of it? I’ve checked many competitors, especially those who rank higher with certain pages, and they had it the different way: Title of block using H2 (or H3) an the content in it, be it news or articales, were declared H3 (or H4).
In Newspaper the titles have h4 and the articles in it h3.
Kind regards,
davistar
Just checked USA Today, BBC, ABC, CNN, NBC and Fox News and all of them have varying headings. Two of them show your point.
I’m no SEO expert but it’s been my understanding that heading tags are treated with priority according to their size. So h3 is more important than h4 but less important than h2 or h1.
That being said, do you really want your block titles with higher priority in the page than your content?
Anyone else know better?
Don’t you think it makes more sense, structure wise, if a title is h2 and the content inside h3 then?
For example:
H3 Title = Call of Dury News
H4 headings for all the news belonging to Call of Duty.
Check the clear structrue here, the biggest news site in Europe with a lot of excellent rankings:
http://www.gamestar.de/spiele/call-of-duty-advanced-warfare/50678.html
After doing some research on it (thanks for pointing me in that direction) I’ve found that the H1 tag is the most SEO recognized tag. The others below it (H2-H6) are used for navigating content and sometimes, if Google doesn’t like the H1 tag it will substitute a lower heading tag as the page title.
Now with that said you’re right, Newspaper does not follow best practices for SEO heading tags. Currently the page title is an H1 and you suggest the following structure:
H1 > Page Title
H2 > Block Title
H3 > Post Title in blocks
But since this theme so readily includes options not to show the block title, whether in builder blocks or widget blocks, that would break the SEO of the heading tags anyway.
H1 > Page Title
H3 > Post Title in blocks
The revised structure would look like this, and it’s a big heading tag no-no to skip levels like H1 to H3/H2 to H4.
What I haven’t found is anything referencing any sort of disparity regarding SEO for using an H3 tag after an H4 tag.
Moreover, how many of us build a homepage in Newspaper and actually use the page title on that homepage? I haven’t seen one yet and I check most every link people post here helping with common support, my own site included. That means our homepages have no H1 tags and that is a big SEO problem in itself.
Of course screen readers, which are the secondary reason for using heading tags at all behind only page structure, use heading tags to navigate the page for the visitor. Would you rather the visitor first reach a content title or a structural block title?
Honestly I don’t see a right answer for this on this theme.
h1 tags should always be used for the de-facto title of the story and match the title tags in meta for Google, Bing and Yahoo.
Technically there should only be one h1 tag for the title/block title; however in HTML5 there is support for multiple h1 tags in sections/containers.
For other tags, there isn’t a necessity to have a h2 show before an h3 unless you have these defined for nested semantic purposes and have such defined for the “semantic web.”
So, (inside main or article semantic containers)
main
h1 – title
h3 – subhead
h2 – giant sub section in body
h3 – subhead for subhead
p – explanation for information
h4 – definition heads
p – explanation for information
h4 – definition heads
p – explanation for information
h4 – definition heads
/main
would be perfectly fine
h2 – h5 can really be addressed as merely headline “sizes” to show priority as a “section head” vs simply a paragraph starter in strong/bold. Put another way, it is best in a story to use a h4 vs simply a strong/bold sub-head for, say, new chapter sections of a book serial. Anything with an h tag is identified semantically as a headline of some kind.
H1 on homepage – this is typically not a huge issue with newspaper sites as there is little or no original content on the “front page” .. it all links to the content pages on the site, which is what you want found when spiders show deep-link content to searchers. So, what exactly gets optimized on the front page? You can end up fighting your own content if you’re trying to get your home page to rank against “awesome motocross videos” versus the actual index on your site of all the motocross videos – both can’t be the best choice for the site.
If you’re running a store/shop, then h1 on home page is critical for branding and bringing folks to home page — if there is substantive original content on the home page.
And there’s the awesomeness I was hoping for on this subject.
Thank you Mr. Simmons.
