There has been much debate recently about where to place the H1 -- does the H1 belong on the logo? Or as the page's title? It's a rather hot topic right now, so a site called H1Debate.com has launched in which you vote for the proper H1 placement via Twitter. Here's what I voted and why.
Historically, the H1 has been on the logo. However, I believe the H1 makes more sense on the title. Why?
From a purely SEO standpoint, the H1 is very important. It tells the search engines what the page is all about. Keywords are super important in your header tags. With the H1 as the logo, you're rendering a powerful piece of SEO ineffective (unless you care only about your brand name).If I'm reading a report or viewing a presentation, I expect the header to be about that page. I don't expect the header to be the logo or brand name, nor to be identical across all pages.
That would just be weird if my presentations all had "Bevelwise" describing every page/slide.SEOMoz (a very well-respected SEO resource) interviewed 37 SEO leaders, and they ranked keywords in H1's as the 4th most important part of SEO.
Google produced their SEO Starter Guide and said "On a page containing a news story, we might put the name of our site into an tag and the topic of the story into an tag." However, the example of the H1 (the name of the site) they gave was "Brandon's Baseball Cards," which is actually very keyword-rich - unlike most logos/brand names (think "Bevelwise"). Additionally, on the next page Google says, to "Imagine you're writing an outline" and "Avoid placing text in heading tags that wouldn't be helpful in defining the structure of the page" - like a logo, for example? Does seeing the word "Bevelwise" over and over help "define the structure of the page?" I suppose you could answer "yes," but that just seems a bit weird to me.
Google's, Matt Cutts also chimes in on the subject in a recent YouTube post, check it out.
Labels: h1 tag, page structure, SEO