Whcih "H" Tags

hcgroup

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Hello Guys,

We generally use H1 and H2 for the content and for H3 or H4 tags for the menu (sidebar) titles.

Is it appropriate? What are your experiences and practices with this?

Thanks in advance
 

Affenmensch

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You can use the H2 for the sidebar as far as I know. That way google know, that your page is the master for the pages on your sidebar. Did not do it myself yet but gonna go for it soon after the relaunch of my page :)
 

PROFRBcom

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8 or 10 years give or take.

Many years ago I had some issue when our sidebar was on the left and Google was reading it as part of the data in articles. I'm honestly not sure why that technical glitch came into being. In fact, I even posted about the glitch here on AGD. When we swapped the sidebar to being right oriented issues went away. Not sure if it was something to do with our Drupal template, Google screwup, or what.

All in all though, I don't think it is harming us in any way.
 

Rick Perry

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And it is not only about Gbot, even people like to have the clear layout, like the article in the classic newspapers - big headline, subheadlines, sub-subheadlines and so on..
 

Anthony Pap

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While this partly true, it's not definite. I would say it really has to do with the length of your article. If the article is like 4000-5000 words long, it does make sense to have a breakdown that goes all the way down to the H4 level.
 

Chris Bernal

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You can use the H2 for the sidebar as far as I know. That way google know, that your page is the master for the pages on your sidebar. Did not do it myself yet but gonna go for it soon after the relaunch of my page :)

Regarding the sidebar, I find that if you have more than one on your site that really helps. I use H2's but have a different sidebar for pages/posts/category. Google seems to like this :)
 

AussiePunter

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I'm pretty tired so I hope I can convey what I want to say properly.

Ideally, all h(eading) tags should be representative of the content which they precede, just like they were always intended to be used in the text based web, before all this fancy graphics, scrolling text, high contrast comic sans with font size=+7 and dancing baby gifs came along. They weren't created for search engines :)

H1 for Major Headings

Then you have your sub headings, naturally, the next would be

h2

which would be all the subjects that are not main headline material but still broadly relevant to the h1 above

h3

this is even more specific, it could relate to h1 but it more likely is a subset of h2 above

h4

I hope you get the idea now because I'm trying to find some stock images that I like and the amount of tabs I have open is making me think I may not ever get to bed at this rate.

and of course you can use them for sidebar headings, there's no real right or wrong way to do things, however, i am a bit of a traditionalist in that the search engines of old treated them a lot differently than they do now - you can use css to make a h7 look more important than a h1 if you want.... but there are other things to consider too. People with limited sight can use the h tags to try and understand the page better and to me, it just makes sense to use the html tags as they were intended to be used.
 
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I have used H's and non H elements for sidebar/footer on a wordpress website. I noticed no change.

The only change I noticed was from my developer who got a bit pissed of my testing :p
 

DaftDog

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When should the H4 be used?
When you wish to break content into relevant headings that falls under H3 content.

<h1>How Bad are Fizzy Drinks For You?</h1>
<p> Blah blah blah blah blah blah and blah...</p>
<h2>Fizzy Drinks Affect Men & Women Differently</h2>
<p> Blah blah blah blah blah blah and blah...</p>
<h3>Brands of Fizzy Drinks</h3>
<p> Blah blah blah blah blah blah and blah...</p>
<h4>How Bad is Coke?</h4>
<p> Blah blah blah blah blah blah and blah...</p>
<h4>How Bad is Pepsi?</h4>
<p> Blah blah blah blah blah blah and blah...</p>
<h2>Rather Drink Beer</h2>
<p> Blah blah blah blah blah blah and blah...</p>
 

NDG

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If it works for the design of the site, then use it. If it looks bad, then don't use it.
 
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