Dumb SEO Questions

(Entry was posted by Bob Stei on this post in the Dumb SEO Questions community on Facebook, 11/02/2017).

Multiple H1 Tags

Dumb SEO question #1. In WordPress when you publish a post or page the field at the top, is that an H1 header? Because I always add an H1 header in the body of the post. Have I been adding two H1s all these years? I Feel a dummy. I Thanks in advance!!
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YOUR ANSWERS

Selected answers from the Dumb SEO Questions Facebook & G+ community.

  • Jonathan Mitchell-Gader: There`s a neat feature in Google Chrome called "Inspect Element" . right click on any HTML element and select INSPECT, then it will show you if the element is h1, h2, etc ...
  • Tim Capper: Typically the post title becomes the H1 on page - yes
  • Bob Stein: Crap. Thank you for your timely response.
  • Rob Maas: There is nothing wrong with 2x h1`s on a page. Placing the same h1 on each page is kinda uncool . . . because the h1 shows your main theme or subject of that particular page, and with the same h1 they all would have the same main theme ...
  • Bob Stein: That`s good to know. Everything I`ve read says it is a no no to Google although I always tried to modify what headers are in the body. Bad thing is I`ve been doing it for over a decade. LOL.
  • Neil Cheesman: ps.. use ctrl + f to find :)
  • Jonathan Mitchell-Gader: or just use screaming frog and it will scrape your entire site and let you know where all the pages with multiple h1s are
  • Rob Maas: Never mind about multiple h1, s, it is the identical ones that should worry you.
  • Neil Cheesman: when visiting a web page - in chrome and IE - right-click and `view source` - it shows you the html code of a webpage you can count the H1s and H2s until the cows come home ;)
  • Jim Munro: Never feel like a dummy Bob Stein . We are all walking the same endless road.
  • Roma Alloui: You can have multiple H1 in a single page depending on the layout, content and amount of words the page has (cutting edge research paper). However, you can`t have two exact match H1. To answer your question, the page title you insert into a post is usually an H1. This is what Neil Patel said about H1s "Search engines will crawl multiple H1s on a page, sure, but the logical priority of an H1 semantic tag means that you’re focusing your SEO efforts on one keyword phrase or sentence, as opposed to many. The presence of more than one h1 won’t necessarily confuse the search engine, but it could dilute the SEO power of a single h1. " Check out that great article written by Neil Patel at: https://neilpatel.com/blog/h1-tag/
  • Alan Bleiweiss: Just to clarify because of how important this concept is, Neil Patel does NOT write his own content. he hires ghost writers, & uses that among many other tactics to make it appear he is an expert. Unfortunately, enough articles have come out in his name as author where it is a crap shoot to ever read anything claimed to be authored by him, and to know whether it`s accurate content or not. The GOOD news is that there is some accuracy in this one article Roma has linked to. Though to be honest, it`s not a GREAT article and offers half-measure understanding. The ONLY time it is valid to use more than one H1 headline, is if you use advanced "section" blocking within an individual page`s code, to create separate, distinct block entities. This is NOT something currently within the capacity of WordPress templates without customization. And for SEO, if you ever do implement "section" blocking, you need to have each block assigned a unique URL, along with unique page Title, H1 headline, and content. At that point, it`s valid. Anything else results in technically conveying "this page has more than one primary topical focus", which is invalid. It`s not logical or reasonable to even pretend that such a signal makes sense.
  • Jonathan Mitchell-Gader: PS .. just wanted to point out how unbelievably amazing it is to see such helpful and timely responses from this group! Go team!
  • Ryan Logan: I use this to get a quick view of the heading structure. You`ll just drop it as a bookmark in your browser and click on it to quickly set what`s up. http://khan.github.io/tota11y/
  • Michael Martinez: Verify your site with Bing and Google`s Webmaster dashboards and they will tell you what on-page elements they object to.
  • Bob Stein: Yeah, been on Google Search Console for years, always saw that issue, but didn`t want to see what was right in front of my own damn eyes. Don`t know what I was thinking. Got a lot of posts to clean up. HA-HA!!

View original question in the Dumb SEO Questions community on Facebook, 11/02/2017).