About that H1 thing

February 6, 2009

While the debate has been raging on, I have had to stop myself repeatedly from posting a fury of twitter feeds because, well, my thoughts on the matter just don’t fit in 140 characters.

Indicate the Page Content

I fall well into the h1-title camp, and think wrapping an <h1> around the company name or, even worse, the company logo image is a blatant bastardization of the tag’s purpose. It’s meant to indicate to the reader what the bulk of content on the page is about, and, while that likely is the company name on the index page, it is certainly not so on most (if not all) of the other pages on the domain.

Search Engine Optimization

I’m not really sure what triggered the Groundhog’s Day avalanche of discussion on this, but I have to address one argument the h1-logo proponents keep putting forward: search engine optimization. They argue that putting the <h1> around the company or website title helps search engines lead users to their page. I see two problems with this argument:

First, that’s what the <title> is for! Google is perfectly capable of seeing the page’s title, as well as the domain on which the page is hosted. It has all the information it needs, right there. In fact, I’d argue that using the <h1> for the company name is detrimental to your SEO, as Google is less aware what the content on a specific page holds, because instead of telling them with the <h1>, you’ve only told them (again) the name of the company.

Second, and more importantly, search engines are constantly learning and adapting. It’s well-known that Google tweaks their search algorithm on a regular basis¹. This is our opportunity to train Google. As the web now stands, there is such a mish-mash of h-tag behavior on the web that Google can only take a best-guess approach, unsure of how much to rely on a particular h1.

However, with time, if we can come to accept the same standard, Google will be able to rely on the h1 tag more than they can now, and it will be even more effective at driving topic-relevant traffic to your site.

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¹ Case in point: I had been regularly using Firefox’s awesome bar to get me to my gmail account by simply typing in “gmail.” For the past week or so, this stopped working because the search algorithm had been altered in such a way that other results ranked highly enough that I’d get the search results page instead of the “feeling lucky” hit I was looking for. And in just the last day or two, this behavior changed back.

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