Faking headings, good or bad?

[WesleySmits]

Recently i got into a discussion with someone regarding the use of headings on an e-commerce website.

i had used headings whenever a heading was used in the design, they all marked the subject of the given section.

For example: The sidebar contains items for filtering products. Each filter had a

containing the name of the filter, like colors or brands.

The discussion i had was about whether the use of headings was appropiate because the words contained within the heading had nothing to do with the main subject of the page (Soccer in this case).

The advice from the SEO agency was to replace the headings with a different html element like a div or span and style this so it looks like tge heading in the design.

What do you guys think?

[davebuts]

I agree with your SEO agency.

Heading tags should be used to provide a hierarchy for the content on a page, not just to format text.

Heading tags should be avoided in page templates where they are not relevant in demonstrating the hierarchy of content on a page - ie. in the header, main navigation, sidebars and footer.

[BradyDCallahan]

Given they were

tags and not something more powerful like an

, I'm not sure how detrimental it would've been, however, I think your SEO agency is right to change the HTML element to something else.

How the

tags were being used was outside their initial design (page hierarchy and design), as davebuts pointed out above.