Quick SEO Tip: Header tags on Wordpress

Okay this quick SEO tip goes out to all bloggers on WordPress (sorry folks, the rest of you wait for the ones coming up).

When you select a WordPress theme, we often don’t check the source code, to check for SEO metrics.

We normally go for the looks and functionalities, while some go to check the W3C compliance even. Which is good, but there’s one thing that we often ignore. The header  tags on a wordpress theme.

Most Wordpress themes follow the standard format of having the H2 tags on the title permalink on a single page, and another H2 title on the sidebar titles.

Not all Wordpress themes follow these but most of the regular ones do. There’s nothing wrong with this, but hey we have the competition to beat right ? So we don’t want to leave out that extra bit of “effort” from our side.

In my humble opinion, its always good to have a theme where on a single post page (single.php), the permalink/article title is an H1 and the sidebar titles of lower importance (H4..H5) compared to the title.)

- Now check your theme. Does your theme have H1 on the article permalinks at single.php ?
- If its an H2 (or worse an H3), try changing it to H1.
- If your sidebar headers are H2, try changing them to H4 and H5 (and keep the style in tact)
- If there’s a Blog title in text, try changing it to H2/H3 and not an H1
- Make sure your article permalink is the only H1 on a single page.

This is an idea situation with header tags on a typical wordpress theme

Please note that while changing the article title to H1, make sure there are no other H1’s on the page. Some themes have the blog name as an H1 on the very top. If that’s the case tweak your header.php (or where the title appears) to change the blog title to an H2 or H3, and style it accordingly to appear large as it normally would.

Now, I’m not trying to say that adding an H1 will give you instant boost in your SERPs. Its just that we don’t want any stone unturned, so…