Having a clearly defined H1 Header tag on a page says to the reader and the search engines, "Here is the primary subject of this page.", which will help your rankings for that phrase. Don't try to stuff too much into your headline, just chose a primary search phrase to target.
It's important to have only one H1 tag per page. You can certainly have multiple headlines appearing on a page, but only ONE of them should actually be inside the H1 tag, and that should be your primary key phrase targeted for that page.
Having multiple H1 tags may now actually be subject to a penalty by the search engines, and is seen in the same light as "keyword stuffing".
The use of more than one H1 tag was previously effective for higher rankings in 2004 and earlier, but near the start of 2006, the algorithms changed, and the search engines saw those multiple tags for what they really were - a slightly dishonest attempt to manipulate the search results. Use the primary subject of your article as the headline.
If you feel there are valid reasons to use multiple headlines, and in many cases there are, then use H2 tags, H3 tags etc.. or use bolded text in the same size as the header text. Your readers will see the same thing, but the search engines will only see one H1 tag.
If your headline is a long one, you could consider splitting it up into two lines. In a super competitive environment, every little bit counts. I would choose to be more meticulous, and actually split the line, with a header tag and with bolded text.
Penguin Flea Collars Are Our Specialty In this case, only the upper line, "Penguin Flea Collars" would be inside the H1 tag. The rest of the line, "Are Our Specialty" is merely bold text in the exact same size. This gives the reader exactly what you want them to see, while providing an even higher percentage of keyphrase relevance in the header tag.
*Note - Unless you are hand coding the page in Notepad, you will likely have to insert a line break into the sentence to be able to format the two parts independently, then backspace it into place. Front Page and Dream Weaver both want to format the entire line, and that gets annoying.
Could this splitting of the headline really make a difference? Well, remember, it's still just a very tiny piece of the "search engine pie". However, I have found that it does matter and I code it appropriately.
All other things being completely equal, I believe that the page with a higher keyword relevance percentage in the header tag would win the better SERP. Remove non relevant words from the header, and you raise that relevance percentage.
One thing that I frequently like to do with header tags is make them an actual link.This points to another relevant area of the website and gives the landing page a deep link to an internal page, with the correct anchor text, prominently placed in the body of the webpage.
Of course, you may not like the appearance of making that headline a link with an underline, but avoid the temptation to manually remove the underline. Doing so somewhat defeats the purpose of making it a link. If the link is really there for your user’s benefit, and not just for the search engines, then of course you'd want it to be underlined. Right?
As time goes on, links in header tags and in the body of the text are being given more and more ranking weight, and I expect one day that not being underlined may be perceived as "hiding" the link, and could lead to a penalty. For any of your client’s sites, or for your own that you really care about, keep your white hat on and leave the underlines in place.
The Header Tag - How to Use it to Your Advantage - To learn more about this author, visit Scott Hendison's Website.
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