Using H3-4 tags in the footer or sidebars: good or not?

[AxialDev]

Howdy SEOmoz fans!

Is it considered a good / bad / neutral practice to include H tags in the footer, as a mean to group a few links?

Take http://www.seomoz.org/ for instance:

- Voted Best SEO Tool 2010! = H2
- Looking for SEO consulting? = H3
- Product and Tools = H3

• Company = H3
• etc.

I often see the same principle applied to sidebars.

I feel like because they don't contribute to the actual content structure and because they are repeated from page to page, we should avoid them, but I have nothing to back my intuition.

[+] Perhaps they are helpful for usability (screen readers) and thin added value (i.e. category names that carry more weight than if they weren't headers).

What do you think?

Thanks for your time.

[matbennett]

In your example they do not appear to be headings, so bad.  It looks like a

• would be more appropriate.

[djlaidler]

Hey Daniel,

I would say they offer a neutral benefit for the following reasons...

• Firstly, by nature sidebars are often replicated across multiple page. They are items that require high visibility and therefore can appear on all pages.
• From a usability perspective, it is good to keep consistency. Styling your H1-6 tags helps as visual aids to attract the users gaze to key parts of the content.
• If a potion of a page is duplicate content, it typically would not affect the rest of the content on the site from ranking. Although I would imagine malicious use of duplicate content could.

My preference would be to use lower Heading tags (say H4,5,6) as not to dilute the use of the primary heading tags, but ultimate this duplicated sidebar is going to offer little SEO benefit from a content perspective. Sidebars can promote other SEO benefits though such as internal linking and usability.

This can apply to the footer area as well, although I would be less inclined to use heading tags (I am sure there are exceptions)

Hope this helps,

Dan

[AxialDev]

Hi Daniel,

Any reason you would be less inclined to use heading tags in the footer vs sidebars?

Thanks

[djlaidler]

Hey Daniel,

Most footers are simply a series of horizontal lists of ancillary pages or popular pages,  along with the odd copyrighted brand name a year and possibly a link to the Web designer/developer or SEO company. Therefore I see heading tags as overkill.

That said, I have seen more elaborate footers that contain a lot of useful information where adding headings to group the information could be useful.

Dan