Google: Headings With Hierarchical Structure An “Awesome Idea”
John Mueller of Google discussed title elements with a member of the SEO community where he emphasized the benefit of using a hierarchical structure when using title elements.
Background context of what Mueller said
Title elements are supposed to be used
– To indicate the topic of a section of a webpage.
Moreover, heading elements have an order of sorting, where
The highest order of importance and represents the lowest level of importance.
The purpose of the title element is to label what a piece of content is about.
The HTML specification allows the use of several elements
. So, technically speaking, using more than Totally valid.
Section 4.3.11 of the Administrator programming language Specificationsns States:
The h1–h6 elements have a heading level, which is given by the number in the element name.
If the document contains one or more headings, at least one heading within the outline must have a heading level of 1.”
However, over use is not considered
of best practices.
Mozilla Developer reference page About the use of headings it recommends the following:
HTML elements are represented by
to
Six levels of section headings.
It is the highest level of the department and
is the lowest.
…avoid using items
multiple on one page
while using items
Multiple pages on a single page are allowed by the HTML standard (as long as they are not nested), but this is not considered a best practice. The page should generally contain an element
One that describes the content of the page (similar to an element <العنوان> in the document). “
John Mueller previously said that it doesn’t matter if a web page uses headers
or five .
The point of his statement is that the level of a heading is not as important as how they are used, and best practice is to use headings to indicate what a piece of content is about.
What Mueller said on Twitter
A member of the SEO community was joking and nicely misleading Mueller about using more than one H1.
chirp:
John Mo: “Your site will rank perfectly with no H1 tags or with five H1 tags,”
– Deji Luminous (@deji_luminous) February 2, 2023
The SEO followed up by sharing how best practices are best used for title elements with an element
Just one, to indicate what the page is about and then use the rest of the headings in order of arrangement, giving a web page a hierarchical structure.
The hierarchical structure connects the sections of the webpage and any subsections within each section.
he chirp:
“I’m very traditional with header elements. (html4 for life! LOL)
I still recommend using only one H1 element per page.
I patiently return to the pages to implement the heading hierarchy for fun.”
John Mueller He tweeted his approval In reply:
“I think this is a great idea and a great exercise.
Not only is hierarchy good for Google, it’s also important for accessibility.
(Google still has to deal with any weird stuff people throw at the web, but thinking about your business always makes sense.)
Hierarchical page structure
In the early days of search engine optimization, it used to count
As an important ranking factor, which is the most important factor of .
Therefore, at that time, one always put their most important keywords in
In order to send a signal to Google that the page was relevant to that keyword.
H1 used to have more rating power so it was necessary to use
To help classify.
The Google algorithm was using keywords as a way to “guess” what a webpage was.
Keywords in the anchor text, keywords in the title tag, and keywords in the link helped
Google guesses what the page was relevant to.
But nowadays, Google doesn’t have to guess.
It is able to understand what sections of a web page are and, therefore, what the entire web page is.
Despite these developments, many SEOs still believe that using
It is a kind of magic ranking factor.
Headlines are no longer about shouting out the keyword you want to rank for.
Title elements now revolve around telling search engines what a piece of content is about.
Each section of content generally revolves around something specific.
Title tags make it easier for search engines to know what the page is about.
This helps them rank the page for the topic.
And according to the official HTML specification, this is technically the proper way to use heading elements.
Finally, Mueller mentioned the quality of the title element as a way to better communicate for reasons of accessibility, such as people using screen readers.
the official The HTML specification says:
“Descriptive titles are especially useful for users with disabilities that make reading slow and for people with limited short-term memory.
These people benefit when section headings make it possible to predict what each section contains.”
So thank you John Mueller for drawing attention to the benefits of using hierarchical headers, for drawing attention to how useful a hierarchical structure is for Google and for accessibility.
Featured image by Shutterstock / Asier Romero