H1 Tags for Articles in Blog Category - confused ;-(

[menelik]

Dear Seomoz community

This is my first post here. Until now I was only browsing the Q&A and learned a lot just by reading the existing topics.

Since we launched our website with a new design last week I started to heavily use Seomoz to track down missing tags, descriptions and other on page issues.

Just out of curiosity I checked the page outline of the Seomoz blog. I was really surprised! Seomoz uses only H1 tags on their blog main page. Each article is wrapped in an H1 plus the blog title.

I am a total SEO beginner but until today I was thinking that using several H1 tags on one page is not optimal. We use one H1 tag on our site for the magazine category description (for example http://www.siam2nite.com/magazine ) and then for the articles H2.

So my question. Should I change my H2 to H1 for the magazine articles like Seomoz did?

Would really appreciate your advise on this

Regards,

Menelik

[danatanseo]

First of all, let me say welcome to SEOMoz Q & A forum. THe best forum on or off the planet!

Okay, I understand you confusion. As SEOs we are all told "Multiple H1 tags...Bad!"

However, think about it this way:  Imagine you are a resource in a library referencing articles on a variety of topics. You are basically presenting a page of abstracts (short summaries) of the documents. You have no idea, based on how the user navigated to your (index card) Web page, which article or topic is going to be of interest to the use. Consequently, you present a list of headlines, all equally stressed, equally important. They are presented to you this way because not a single one of them is more important to the hosting document than another. Okay so each document has a major title, headline, whatever you want to call it. Because it's a listing of equally important topics served to searchers in a broad audience, the multiple

tags actually make perfect sense.

Now, one could argue that

The Daily SEO Blog

should be the lone

title, but it really doesn't express what's most important on the page. Also, with  a bunch of paginated pages it would be near impossible for a search engine to discern what is really important on the paginated pages if that same

tag was used on all of them. What really makes sense is that the individual headlines each gets and

tag. That signals to Google "Hey, Googlebot, this is a page with headlines and summaries that click through to the full articles."

You will notice that on the subsequent pages, the tag

The Daily SEO Blog

plus the

for the main article remain, but are the only

tags on the page.

In terms of <h>tags try to think like a librarian. This will help a lot in determining which ones to use where.</h>

Hope that helps!

Dana

# The Daily SEO Blog

  Now, one could argue that 

[menelik]

Hi Dana

Sorry for my late reply and thank you very much for your detailed explanation. Your answer helped me a lot specially the hint "thinking like a library"

Sincerely

Menelik

[danatanseo]

You are very welcome Manelik!