Recommendations for the length of h1 tags and how much does it matter. What is the major disadvantage if the h1 tags are slightly longer.
-
recommendations for the length of h1 tags and how much does it matter. What is the major disadvantage if the h1 tags are slightly longer.
-
Think of your page like the front of a newspaper.
Your H1 is your big headline. Short sharp and to the point. People skim pages when reading, but will read headlines. If the H1 catches the attention they are more inclined to read on.
Continue skimming down the page of the newspaper (your page) you may skip 'normal text' but your eyes catch the next H2, which is like your newspaper sub-title.
I went to a Matt Bailey seminar once, and he did a great piece on how pages catch the attention and how people read/skim pages. He has a book which also covered it.
-
The h1 tag should help the customer - so it should be customer centric. You have a split part of a second to capture the customers attention so often short and sweet matching a variation of the target keyword phrase is the way to go.
-
From my understanding, there is technically no limit to the length of an H1 tag. Rule of thumb for me was always to keep it short and to the point. You don't want to water down any relevancy gained from the h1 by shoving too much into it.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Unsolved How much time does it take for Google to read the Sitemap?
Hi there, I could use your help with something. Last week, I submitted my sitemap in the search console to improve my website's visibility on Google. Unfortunately, I got an error message saying that Google is not reading my sitemap. I'm not sure what went wrong. Could you take a look at my site (OceanXD.org) and let me know if there's anything I can do to fix the issue? I would appreciate your help. Thank you so much!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | OceanXD1 -
Should I add no-follow tags to my widget links?
Matt Cutts recommended in a video in 2013 to add rel="nofollow" on widget links that link back to your website. Some background of my company: We're a software company for website chat. There's a 'powered by' link in our widgets that links back from our users' websites to our website. Currently these are all follow links. I checked out the links of our competitors, and it seems none of them have no follow on their widget backlinks. This, together with the fact that the video is quite old and information on this issue rather scarce, makes me doubt whether we should change our widget backlinks to no follow. Does anyone have thoughts on this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Maximuxxx0 -
Does the order matter for a rel="alternate" tag
Hi! We just launched our new mobile site and I am trying to get the rel="alternate" tags put on the desktop site. The specs had the tags formatted like this: They ended up like this: My developer is telling me the order does not matter. Can anyone confirm? Does the order matter? Thank You!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | shop.nordstrom0 -
Does it matter if the meta description and meta keywords come before the title tag in the
The way our site was built, engineers put the title tag blow the meta desc. and meta keywords. I asked to have it changed based on the best practice of putting the most important content first, but apparently doing this will cause a major ripple effect in the way the site was engineered. Will we lose out on full SEO benefit with this structure? Should I stand down? <title></p></title>
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Vacatia_SEO0 -
Have Title Tags Changed After Hummingbird?
Now that Hummingbird is really looking at longer-tail searches and almost a Q&A style search, should the way we do our title tags change? Moz still recommends: Optimal Format Primary Keyword - Secondary Keyword | Brand Name
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | netviper
or
Brand Name | Primary Keyword and Secondary Keyword But is this really right anymore after Hummingbird? Should we be more of a Q&A type title tag, while still using our Primary Keyword? For example: If I am targeting Red Nike Shoes, should my title tag be: Red Nike Shoes, Nike Shoes | Shoes.com or now: We carry the latest Red Nike Shoes | Shoes.com or Find Red Nike Shoes on sale at shoes.com What are your thoughts?0 -
How accurate and quick does Google pick up on canonical tags?
Hey Peeps! I was just wondering what your experiences are in how fast Google will pick up on canonical tags and how often they use the 'strong hint' in stead of leaving it be? I'm based in The Netherlands and for websites with a decent amount of content and links (where Google indexes new content quickly) they pick up on it within 1-2 weeks. So far they've ignored some canonical tags on one of my websites. Perhaps that's because they don't agree with the degree in which the pages are similar. Thanks in advance!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | StevenvanVessum0 -
Major Website Migration Recovery Ideas?
Since starting our business back in 2006 we've gone through alot of branding, and as a result URL and architectual migrations. This has always something that has been driven by usability, brand awareness and technical efficiency reasons, while knowing that there would be SEO hits to take from it....but ultimately hoping to have a much stronger foundation from an SEO perspective in the long run. Having just gone through our most recent (and hopefully final) migration, we are now about 15% down on traffic (although more like 35% - 40% in real terms when seasonality is stripped out). Below is a timeline to our structural history: 2007 - 2009 = We operated as a network of inidividual websites which started as 1, www.marbellainfo.com, but grew to 40, with the likes of www.thealgarveinfo.com, www.mymallorcainfo.com, www.mytenerifeinfo.com, www.mymaltainfo.com etc.. 2009 - 2010 = We decided to consolitdate everything onto 1 single domain, using a sub-domain structure. We used the domain www.mydestinationinfo.com and the subdomains http://marbella.mydestinationinfo.com, http://algarve.mydestinationinfo.com etc.. All old pages were 301 redirected to like for like pages on the new subdomains. We took a 70% drop in traffic and SERPS disappeared for over 6 months. After 9 months we had recovered back to traffic levels and similar rankings to what we had pre-migration. Using this new URL structure, we expanded to 100 destinations and therefore 100 sub-domains. 2011 = In April 2011, having not learnt our lesson from before :(, we undwent another migration. We had secured the domain name www.mydestination.com and had developed a whole new logo and branding. With 100 sub-domains we underwent a migration to the new URL and used a sub-directory folder. So this time www.myalgarveinfo.com had gone to <a></a>http://algarve.mydestinationinfo.com and was now www.mydestination.com/algarve. No content or designs were changed, and again we 301 re-directed pages to like for like pages and with this we even made efforts to ask those linking to us to update their links to use our new URL's. The problem: The situation we fine ourselves in now is no where near as bad as what happend with our migration in 2009/2010, however, we are still down on traffic and SERPS and it's now been 3 months since the migration. One thing we had identified was that our re-directs where going through a chain of re-directs, rather than pointing straight to the final urls (something which has just been rectified). I fear that our constant changing of URL's has meant we have lost out in terms of the passing over of link juice from all the old URL's and loss of trust with Google for changing so much. Throughout this period we have grown the content on our site by almost 2x - 3x each year and now have around 100,000 quality pages of unique content (which is produced by locals on the ground in each destination). I'm hoping that someone in the SEOmoz Community might have some ideas on things we may have slipped up on, or ways in which we can try and recover a little faster and actually get some growth, as opposed to working hard and waiting a while just for another recovery. Thanks Neil
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Neil-MyDestination0 -
Canonical Tag and Affiliate Links
Hi! I am not very familiar with the canonical tag. The thing is that we are getting traffic and links from affiliates. The affiliates links add something like this to the code of our URL: www.mydomain.com/category/product-page?afl=XXXXXX At this moment we have almost 2,000 pages indexed with that code at the end of the URL. So they are all duplicated. My other concern is that I don't know if those affilate links are giving us some link juice or not. I mean, if an original product page has 30 links and the affiliates copies have 15 more... are all those links being counted together by Google? Or are we losing all the juice from the affiliates? Can I fix all this with the canonical tag? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jorgediaz0