Should I use **tags or h1/h2 tags for article titles on my homepage**

[blankslatedumbo]

I recently had an seo consultant recommend using tags instead of h1/h2 tags for article titles on the homepage of my news website and category landing pages. I've only seen this done a handful of times on news/editorial websites. For example: http://www.muscleandfitness.com/

Can anyone weigh in on this?

[UmarKhan]

Hey Kael,

I won't recommend skipping H1/H2 tags for **. These tags have specific purposes and they should be use accordingly. Having H1 as the page/post title shows that what your page will about so it's better to use them.

As for the http://www.muscleandfitness.com, even they are using the H1 in post titles. For example, check out this link:
http://www.muscleandfitness.com/athletes-celebrities/news/jon-stewart-host-2015-summerslam I am not sure in which context your consultant recommended this but I'd love to know the impact of this if he has adopted this approach in past.

Hope this helps!

P.S:Sorry for Summer Slam link, I'm a huge WWE fan and can't wait for this Sunday

Umar**

[O2C]

It is not recommended to have more than 1

tag on a page so using

tags as your article titles might cause an SEO issue when they display on your home page.

Depends on how the site is coded to work but I would say its safer to have the titles as

tags if you are displaying them all on one page and then when the user clicks through to the article it should have a

tag.

[blankslatedumbo]

Thanks Umar. Article titles (on the article page) should absolutely be h1. My question is specific to article titles on the home page or any category page where there are several articles listed. In that case is

better or ?

[AlanBleiweiss]

having the clearer understanding about the concept of having multiple "titles" on a single page (an H1 headline is the in-content "title" for that page), David is correct - while HTML 5 allows multiple H1 tags on a single page, this is bad because the H1 communicates "this is the primary topical focus of this unique page".

Because of that, if you have headlines within the content area for content elsewhere on the site, and link to that other content, then those are absolutely best served with H2 headline tags, or if not , then at the very least, "strong" tags if the topic of each target page is significantly different than the primary topic of the page they're all listed on.

[blankslatedumbo]

Thanks, Alan. That helps!