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Comment by martinshen | Hacker News Reader

I just did a major SEO audit for our site. Changing title tags and h1 tags are insanely important. It literally looked like we were hiding ourselves from Google. I'll probably do a post soon about this on our/my blog.

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Would love to read that when you do. I think I understand what the title tags require, but I haven't heard about the h1. Is that just changing it to make sure that the h1 is the title of the page instead of the site?

Also how does the HTML5 heading system (where you can have multiple h1s on a page) affect SEO, do you know?

h1 is an indicator to the search engine that you consider that blurb/content to be the most important on the page. So the h1 should be optimized for the keywords you are trying to rank for. Also, if you have a bunch of h1 tags on a single page, it can actually dilute the weight of your most important heading. I recommend using just one h1 tag on a page to keep Google from having to guess what is most important. I also recommend not using any other h tags on the page for the same reason. Don't try to rank for a bunch of keywords on one page. Instead, concentrate on one or related keywords per page and use h tags to signal to the search engine what you think is most important.

Search engines are dumb. Make everything really obvious to them.

Not using any other h* tags seems like crazy advice. I could definitely believe that search engines haven't become privy to the multiple h1 tags that HTML5 proposes, but I assume that will come with time too. Since the idea for multiple h1's makes lots of semantic sense for components, I'm going to keep using them. Keeping track of heading levels inside components is hard/impossible.

Have you seen the effects of not using any other h tags on your site besides the h1?

In my experience, I've seen the opposite. Well done h2s in fact, can really boost a series of site's rankings.

Yes, I have seen the main keyword get boosted in the SERPs when other h* tags are removed. I have seen this on multiple sites. This is not a rare technique and other SEOs do it too.

No doubt your page also can get ranked using the normal h- hierarchy.

The point of this technique is to put as much value on the main keyword as possible. Make it really obvious to the search engines what your page is about. Your page may have other requirements, so use accordingly.

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