Recently, one of our Display.Church partners, Nicole To sent us the following message: “Hi Jason, wondering your thoughts on this problem I’m trying to solve. I’m doing a deep-dive on our website SEO. It appears that H1 is the classification of the month headings in my Display.Church calendars. I would like to limit the amount of H1 headings so that they don’t get picked up by Google searches. Is it possible to update the headings to a lower classification?”
Since we recently added SEO options to Display.Church, Nicole’s request fell right in line.
How many H1 tags should a webpage have?
According to Google’s John Mueller, multiple H1 headings are not detrimental to SEO. Furthermore, there is no limit to how many you can use on a page. In fact, Mueller says that Google’s systems can work with any HTML, including multiple H1 tags. He suggests that semantically structured headings can help Google pages.
However, some say that multiple H1 tags should be used appropriately and not overused to the point of spamming. They should also fit contextually within the page’s structure. For example, one H1 tag might be okay if a page needs more than one page title.
In Display.Church
Our widget is not affecting the H1 header on sites where it is embedded. This is done automatically ‘behind the scenes’.
Best practices
Here are some best practices for using H1 tags for SEO:
- Use a single H1 per page
- Make sure every important page has an H1
- Include your target keyword
- Keep H1 tags under 60 characters
- Match your H1s to your title tags for article pages
- Optimize your H1 to satisfy search intent
SEO is important. It’s how the search engines find you and what they ‘think’ about you. We are making every effort to ensure you can reach more people to connect with your data and its displays.
Design, SEO
