SEO for Wordpress Part 2: Header Tags

This is the second part of my series on SEO for Wordpress. The first part was on title tags.

The H1 Tag

After the title tag, the H1 tag is the most valuable on-page asset in influencing the search engines.

Most Wordpress themes have the same H1 tag on every page of the site because there is one header.php file that is used for each page. In this header.php file the name of the blog is surrounded by H1 tags. That will work great for the home page, but not for every other page on the site. For all other pages, we will want to put the title of the page in the H1 tag.

The Solution
To accomplish this we will need to create two separate header.php files. One for the home page and one for all the other pages on the site.

Duplicate the original header.php file and rename it header-home.php and reference it only from your index.php file. In most cases the H1 tag should include the title of your blog and any important keywords. For the Virtual Marketing Blog we put ‘Internet Marketing Blog - Internet Marketing News, Reviews and Insights’ in the H1 tag for the home page.

Note: Instead of creating a second header file, you can copy the contents of your header.php file and replace the <?php get_header(); ?> in the index.php file.

The header.php file that we reference from all other pages (single.php, archive.php, search.php, page.php…) should have no H1 header tags.

By default the title for each post or page is surrounded by H2 tags. We’ll want to change that to be H1 tags. Your title in single.php should look something like:

<h1><a href="<?php the_permalink() ?>" rel="bookmark" title="<?php the_title(); ?>"><?php the_title(); ?></a></h1>

The H2 Tags

On the home page and category pages we want the title of each blog post surrounded by H2 tags. This is the default setting for most Wordpress themes. For individual posts you can use H2 tags to highlight subtitles in the copy. These are fairly easy changes to make in the code of your pages.

The header tags in most Wordpress blogs are used improperly because of the one header issue. Correct this issue and you could see an increase in search traffic to your blog.

More SEO for Wordpress:
SEO for Wordpress Part 1: Title Tags
SEO for Wordpress Part 2: Header Tags
SEO for Wordpress Part 3: Filenames
SEO for Wordpress Part 4: Meta Description
SEO for Wordpress Part 5: Duplicate Content
SEO for Wordpress Part 6: Organizing Category Pages

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Thanks again for another great post. I’ve been using WP for some time now but up until your last post I haven’t thought about SEO for my blog. How many updates are you planning for this series? The more the better!

I’m glad you are getting some use out of the SEO for Wordpress series. I’m planning on doing four more posts.

Excellent article!

I tried to change the following line of code in my index.php file:

to

However, I just get a blank page.

Any suggestions??

Thanks

you said: “and replace the in the index.php file”
replace it with? I tried replacing this code
with but I’m getting a fatal error on the home page.
and yes I uploaded header-home.php to my template file.

Thanks in advance,
Christine

[...] Headers ("h" HTML tags) is a great blog post element to use if you want to have a win-win result when you have the doubts on which side fall to. Search engines, when they are indexing the contents of your blog, pay more weight to the keywords contained within your headers. [...]

Great articles but replace the in the index.php file with WHAT?

Another way to word the question: How do we get index.php to reference the new header-home.php file?

Thank you for your time,

Bert Regards,
Bert

Hi Bert,
In the index.php file, where it says:

<?php get_header(); ?>

change to:

<?php include("header-home.php"); ?>

Thanks Luke, GREAT guide. I know SEO but I do not know WordPress, your articles are by far the best on the net!

great stuff!