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Should every blog post have an H1?

by UnkwnUsr
7 replies
  • SEO
    • |
So I was perusing a website the other day and did one of those automated SEO scans for my blog. It came back with a few areas to improve one being missing H1 tags for blog post. Now I was wondering how important is this? Many times after the title of the post I'll just delve right into the content. Seems kind of awkward to try to jam another heading there if it really doesn't add anything to the article. Or am I missing something here?

I know I've seen some quite successful blogs that seem to employ a new heading for each and every paragraph, plus white space in between almost every sentence. To me it seems like they are dumbing things down but maybe that's the style that Google prefers.
#blog #h1 heading #post
  • Profile picture of the author AmanD
    The title should be your H1
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    • Profile picture of the author UnkwnUsr
      Originally Posted by AmanD View Post

      The title should be your H1
      This doesn't appear to happen on Wordpress or at least not automatically.
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      • Profile picture of the author mkaiser
        Originally Posted by UnkwnUsr View Post

        This doesn't appear to happen on Wordpress or at least not automatically.
        This is a theme dependent. If the theme does NOT h1 your title, change your theme.
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        • Profile picture of the author yukon
          Banned
          Originally Posted by mkaiser View Post

          This is a theme dependent. If the theme does NOT h1 your title, change your theme.
          That's a bit drastic considering all you would have to do is edit one line of code on the template file & one spot on the CSS file for styling the <h> tag.

          I would edit 2 lines of code before I replaced a theme & messed up the entire site structure (internal nav links, etc...).
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    • Profile picture of the author yukon
      Banned
      Originally Posted by AmanD View Post

      The title should be your H1
      True the <h1> tag should summarize the content of the page but it doesn't necessarily mean it should be the same text as the <title> text.

      A better setup (IMO) is to use the <h1> tag as an alternative page <title>. I've done a lot of testing on this, I can consistently get Google to ignore my page <title> & show the <h1> text as the SERP title for multiple pages on the same domain.

      My point is, the <h1> is basically doing the same job as the <title> tag when it comes to SERP titles so instead of a single <title> text you can optimize for a second keyword phrase to be shown in Google SERPs to help boost SERP CTR.

      Example, If I had 50 pages on a domain, I could use each of those 50 pages to have a 2nd keyword variation for each individual <h1> tag (one tag per page) which would give me 100 SERP titles. Obviously it all depends on the keyword phrase being searched in order to trigger the <h1> tag to be shown as the SERP title, so both <title> & <h1> need to be relevant to each other.

      More bang for your buck with very little work.
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  • Profile picture of the author Kim Writes
    I usually include H1 just to be on the safe side as far as SEO goes. Besides, H1 can make your content appear more authoritative - in my eyes, at least.
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  • Profile picture of the author Patho
    The Title is automatically your H1 tag...
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