03/05/2010
The H1 Debate
I was in a meeting with a client today, and the question came up about whether the heading 1 tag <h1> on the page should be used for your logo, or the first headline on each page. This is a topic that has provoked MANY online-geek arguments over time, with "true believers" on either side. There was even an "h1 debate" website at one point where you could vote on your preference. Either way validates and is "standards compliant," so from a purely academic point of view either one is "correct."
But here are three very good reasons why the headline that best describes the content of your page (NOT your logo) should be your <h1>:
- Usability: <h1> ... <h4> should be used to ORGANIZE information and ORIENT users. The logo is metadata about the SITE, not relevant information about the CONTENT OF EACH PAGE.
- Screen readers think of your page as outlines, so having a "bogus" headline (i.e. your logo), means lots of extra text that must be listened to on EVERY page before the meat of the content is reached.
- Google says so, and search engines matter. Besides, they have a lot of smart people who have thought about this, so their interpretation can generally be considered a "best practice."
Some other interesting thoughts:
- The real problem is actually not "what is an <H1>" but rather "why doesn't CSS have a <LOGO> tag by default?"
- It's OK to have multiple H1s on a page, IF there are multiple topics on a page. For instance, the homepage of a website, or a company's main products page could very well have multiple <h1> tags
- Don't make everything an H1 though. Utilize the different organizational levels different headers offer.
- If you're concerned that your organization's name might not come up in search engines, you should make the logo an <h1> *also*. You can do this if, for example, your company name is also used as a common given name or surname, your URL is not the same as your company name, or if your URL has ".net" at the end.
The great news for us (and our clients) is that the Gravity Switch CMS (gsCMS) was designed this way from the start, mostly because it's what made sense intuitively when we first put together our data structure.
Whew!
~Jason Mark
Gravity Switch President & Co-founder