Hi all... I need to decide whether to make a H1 the same as Title or to make each one seperetly. I am building a dynamic content manager system - and I need to decide if I want to make it to ALL the website, same h1-title or to allow picking different h1 and title for each page... What do you think? Thanks in advance, Guy
I always match it to the page title, although they should be unique for each individual page on your site.
They will be uniqe for the page. But in the same page - H1 and TITLE will be the same... Can it get me into trouble?
There are a couple of recent posts on seochat on this topic (http://forums.seochat.com/showpost.php?p=299558&postcount=14). Basically, the claim is that pages that contained the same keywords at the beginning of the title, beginning of meta description, and beginning of a Hx tag dropped in the SERPs from page 1 to mars following the Jagger update. An overoptimization penalty is the theory. Furthermore, changing these elements, so they don't match caused the pages to reappear. One of my sites suffered this fate after Jagger and I looked into this theory. Many of my pages had these elements with the exact same phrase. Some did not. All were universally dropped by a few hundred places from page 1 positions. Based on this, I can say that is was not exact matching elements alone that caused the drop. An over-optimization penalty is still a possibility since the site has plenty of on-page SEO work. I am working on mixing up these elements anyway to create changes and hopefully get G excited again. I am still investigating, but exact matching title, meta desctiption, and H1 was not the sole cause for the drop in SERPs.
I have it on all my sites, no negative effects so far ... and just as a definition why title and h1 were invented... it stays within perfect reason of the purpose of title, h1 and meta descr. as they are the same. No garantuees however. Have a great xmas Bas
I don't know, since their matched from the beginning. Must work though, I've got two sites less than 4 months old getting 5k uniques from MSN between them already Of course Yahoo and G still hate them. Good file and linking structure helps too.
It works well for yahoo and msn, but this thread is more directed towards google. My sites are 3-4 months old and in the sandbox, so not getting much traffic at all from google, apart for some vague terms. So can't honestly say if it is working for me or no, just do it so that I don't get penalized for over optimization.
Blogging is real fascinatining for getting mega search results and only started playing with it seriously in September this year. I use the exact same phrase in the TITLE TAGS and the intitial H1 TAGS plus again two other ways in the website including the meta keywords. I just keep getting more and more traffic from google. Practically anything I write about in my blog is on the first page of google within 3 days - 1 week. I did a lot of tweaking to the wordpress templates plus I also did some tweaking to the wordpress admin system and the wordpress includes folder. So its quite different. So far my traffic has doubled every month since using these new wordpress templates I designed (since september 2005) So this month I'll have about 4000 unique visitors (nothing huge I know) for my blog and if it keeps doubling I should have around 4000 per day by May . I've done absolutely no publicity or directory submission etc. Just about 6 random link exchanges which were with pr nothing sites. I did set up an automated COOP/Network similar to WebBlogs Inc which seems to work pretty cool. But otherwise I just write cool articles about random stuff and then get heaps of results in google. People seem to like my articles. I find this all quite interesting since my personal site has a PR of only one on the front page. Adsense CTR for the template is about 5%. In September when I started writing regularly and put the new templates in I had 96 different keyphrases (with multiple hits on some of the more popular key phrases). So far this month 1466 different keyphrases (now my top keyphrases are getting more hits than ever before) This is really cool I just add more articles about what ever I want to write about and its an ever increasing traffic machine. in all modesty... quality content is king! (Plus super awesome wordpress templates and wordpress - wordpress 2.0 beta is off the hook, and I've already been adding additional tweaks)
I would sergest trying not to do the H1 tag section the same as the title as this could make keyword density to high but also it may not so if you are going to do it then make sure you check the density of your keywords on the page i do use H1 tags for this but i change the text so that its not the same as the title but still useing my main keywords it must be ok as i have ranked very high in yahoo and msn LOL i am just waiting on google now
I really don't see the problem: h1 is intended as the main header tag of a internet document, it is only natural to be the same as title (by definition). And about the kw density: you should always avoid spamming, doesn't have to do anything with having title and h1 the same (as the original question).
I agree with BasB! But what I am afraid of, is that google doesn't always act like what is logical and what is not. I see still a lot of website that hide texts in the background color, I still see spammers get in the first positions, and I still can't see what I am doing wrond I have the feeling it's not going to change soon...