Custom Wordpress Theme - HTML5 Outline - H1 display: none

[projectassistant]

We are using a custom wordpress theme for to help us optimize our webpages.  We're trying to structure the webpages so that things are as optimized as possible for our clients.  I was wondering if we could get some feedback on whether or not we using the correct page structure across the site.  We have set a no-display class on the H1 so that the page title wouldn’t mess up the layout and is placed above the logo and have placed other header tags on the different page sections and added in keyword variations to avoid having untitled sections.

Is

equal to

?

Is there a better way to structure this content?  Are we not doing something that we should be or overdoing anything?

I guess my main question is what would be the best way to use HTML5 to structure this website?http://estheticdentistry.net

[Schwaab]

You are essentially cloaking a keyword rich H1 tag.  I would not do this as it is against Google Webmaster Guidelines.

[Jonathan1979]

You need to try and find this code in the template files (appearance -> editor).  You will find the blog post ones called single-post.php or something like that, or possibly the whole lot are under the header.php.  You may want to alter one of he h2 tags for the blog pages to h1 as well (single-post).

Without seeing it, it is difficult to know where it is.  It should be relatively easy to search for the H1 tag though.

Unfortunately it seems quite an odd theme, as I see you are hiding multiple headings... it seems to post it like 3 times on each page for some reason.

Please backup your site before doing anything like I suggest.

[evolvingSEO]

Hi Anthony

I would not do that As schwabb said, it's hiding text and that's going to raise a flag. Instead, I would first understand the original intent of how/why H1 tags work: http://www.seobythesea.com/2012/01/heading-elements-and-the-folly-of-seo-expert-ranking-lists/ - they should be the main "heading" or on-page title of a document, as Bill explains very well in that post.

Looking at the homepage, the part that says "Esthetic Dentistry - Your Reliable Los Angeles Dentists" would be the best H1 tag - it is the main heading of the content for that page. The same follows for the other pages, for example: http://www.estheticdentistry.net/cerec-dentistry-in-la/ - the H1 would be "Get CERC Dentistry from...."

-Dan

[projectassistant]

Thank you for the answer guys.  I  agree with you and Schwabb.  We originally did this for design purposes to try and have a clean HTML5 Outline with the header, banner, and any sub banner content that comes before body content, included in the outline.  We were annoyed by having a H1 at the very top of the page and annoyed by the fact that it could be interpreted as trying to game the system.  Our research at the time of developing the site's theme didn't give us a better alternative so we chose design, especially when Google site cache was showing that our H1's were still visible with a CSS class that contained the display: none property.

Since then, we learned of a better way to do this that involves removing the header content from the outline and still starting the page content with an H1.  This Distilled blog article is a good example of this. We'll be rolling out a new theme update soon to fix this to satisfy things from both a design and SEO perspective.