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HTML

Posted by Boaz Keren Gil
Boaz Keren Gil
18,947 Points

How does the number of H tags influence SEO

Hello, I'm building a website to a restaurant and I'm writing the menu in the HTML.

It seems that I have around 6 H1 tags, 6H2 tags, and about 100+- H3 tags (those are the menu items themselves).

I wondered if those numbers can make the website ranked lower in SEO? should I replace the H3 with P?

Thanks, Boaz.

4 Answers

dnogmdehbp
dnogmdehbp
Courses Plus Student 726 Points

H tags are useful, but don't over use them.

H tags are only useful when the text wich is connected with the H tag. If your H1 says "ice for sale" and there is no following paragraph which tells in 300-500 words that you sell ice its useless! (this is just a little part of SEO)

So, don't use H tags for menu's or on site title's, only when you display text. h1 for the head text, h2 for the less important text and so on to h6 (mostly of the times i use 1 H1, 1 H2 and 2 H3, if you put more text on one page consider make a new page for it.)

2 H1 tags is possible, but you have to tell Google (if you code seo for Google) the importance of both h1 tags.

So, 100+ h3 tags are not usefull, consider recode them, give them the same code, but then as 

.menuline{
    code:here;
}

Rather then waste the <h3> :)

This example is a wast of H tags and not SEO-proof.

...
<body>
        <header>

        <header>
                <div class="someclass">

                                <h1>sitetitle</h1>

                                        <h2>Something you want to be big on screen</h2>
                </div>

</body>
Boaz Keren Gil
Boaz Keren Gil
18,947 Points

I replaced all my h3 tags to list items in an unordered list, and h1 and h2 to divs. Thanks for the detailed answer.

Dean Wiseman
Dean Wiseman
20,901 Points
Dean Wiseman
Dean Wiseman
20,901 Points

Hi Boaz,

I highly recommend the following page from MOZ.

http://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-seo

Chapter four covers the basics of Search Engine Friendly Design and Development which covers a lot of the on-page optimization.

Also one of the perks of being a student on TreeHouse is that you can get a free 90 trial of Moz Pro (check out student perks in the footer) which includes the tools you need to run analytics of your site which can produce a page optimization report from your site with recommendations of what needs to be added or removed. (i.e, missing meta description, over use of certain tags or keywords, etc)

Hope this helps.

Cheers

myackley35
myackley35
34,574 Points
myackley35
myackley35
34,574 Points

Hey Boaz!

That's a lot of header tags to be using on a site. I think your best bet is to use one h1 tag as an overall description of your site, how you want to achieve this is up to you, and use any other heading tags as a means of organizing your content. The best way to think about this is how an article is formatted. Other than that the best advice I can give you is to keep your content fresh and well organized and you should be good to go. I've found this checklist on CSS-Tricks to be a good reference.

I hope I helped you out!

Lisa Tan
Lisa Tan
4,673 Points
Lisa Tan
Lisa Tan
4,673 Points

Hi Boaz,

Search engines generally figure that things in the heading tags must be what a page is about, so use the heading tags to identify the different sections of your website.

Don't try to fool the engines by putting your whole page in headings tags and then making it readable with CSS, or sprinkling heading tags gratuitously throughout the page. Instead, use heading tags where they make sense. Use your H1 tag for the main title of the page, and H2 and H3 tags for section headings etc.

There's a saying in the SEO community, "content is king". That means that what's most important to the search engines is what you have on your page. The substance of your page, the paragraphs that make up an article or the descriptions of products/services, is the content.

So a page composed entirely (or mostly) of H tags, with no real content following it, probably won't count for much, and will do you no SEO favours.

Hope that helps :)

Lisa

Boaz Keren Gil
Boaz Keren Gil
18,947 Points

Thank you, that helped a lot.