"Heading 1" vs. "Title" Style for SEO

[BlueLinkERP]

In Word, you can specify "Heading 1" text which Google presumably treats the same as an

HTML tag. Is there any benefit in using the "Title" style? Is it the equivalent of a web page's title?

[Kara.Wallace]

Hi David,

No there isn't any benefit.

The "Title" style is just that, a style. It will occur in the body section of your HTML and will not impact how Google ranks your page. It just changes the physical attributes of the text to look nice.

The "Title" tag is an element in HTML. It occurs in the head section of your HTML and will impact how Google ranks your page. This is one of the more powerful, if not the most powerful, on-page SEO elements.

Does that make sense?

Mike

[BlueLinkERP]

That does make sense. Is that the case for the "Heading 1" style as well?

It makes sense to me that Google would look for the "Heading 1" style much like it would an

tag.

[jesse-landry]

if the html tag is style="heading1" and it's adding something in there like that ( that wouldn't do anything, but as an example) then no. The tag needs to read

for google to register it as an h1 tag.

Honestly this would all be resolved if you weren't using Word. Why are you using Word?

[Kara.Wallace]

You will want to have your heading 1 style configured to use an

tag. You would not want to use <heading1>or any variation... you'd want to use

.

If you are using a WYSIWYG editor and you copy text from Word that is using a Heading 1 style, the code version should interpret that as

- which Google should see the code equivalent of heading 1.

Make sense?

Mike</heading1>

[BlueLinkERP]

I think there is some confusion. I am talking about using Word to create a PDF to be placed on our site. The PDFs rank fairly well but I want to be sure we are optimizing the titles with proper tags if possible.

Does that make more sense now?

So basically my question is: is there a way to define a line of text in a PDF / word doc to indicate to Google that it is the "h1" tag on the page and give it greater emphasis?

[BlueLinkERP]

Please see my response to Jesse. Hopefully I made things clear

[jesse-landry]

Yes this does make more sense but now I have to tell you how anti-PDF I am.

I absolutely hate PDFs. Sorry. Not trying to be rude and I'm sure you have your reasons, but is there anyway you can make this a webpage instead? What are the reasons, if you don't mind me asking.

Optimizing a PDF is not something I can advise you on but I can tell you that they don't work with things like H1 tags and hypertext markup...

[BlueLinkERP]

I've been using PDFs because it is the way we want to make downloadable content available for our users. In the past I created webpage versions of our content as well but I am worried about duplicate content issues.

The optimal scenario would be to have both the PDF and webpage but canonicalize the PDF to the page. Is that possible? Right now, I am only aware of the ability to pass canonicalization to the PDF from a webpage, not the other way around.

[Kara.Wallace]

Ah! I see what you are saying.

No. The "title" style will not help you; however, H1-H6 in a PDF will still help you, along with the file name.

You can specify the Title, Author, and Subject on the Description tab under File > Properties in Acrobat.

That should help you optimize your PDF.

Mike

[Kara.Wallace]

Here is some additional great info on optimizing PDFs:

http://moz.com/ugc/how-to-optimize-pdf-documents-for-search

[BlueLinkERP]

Thanks for the info! However, I'm still trying to figure out the best way to offer both web content as well as PDFs. Is there a way to offer a downloadable PDF but canonicalize it to the web content to avoid duplicate content issues?

[Kara.Wallace]

This article from Google Webmasters Central should solve it for you, Supporting Rel Canonical HTTP Headers

Mike

[BlueLinkERP]

Beauty. Thanks Mike.

[Kara.Wallace]

No problem.