SEO And The Importance Of The H1 Tag

It’s no secret that the search engines are passionate about WordPress, and will routinely index new installations within hours of their creation, but it could have been an even bigger love story if one of the most basic cornerstones of Search Engine Optimization had not been overlooked. For some mysterious reason, the creators of WordPress decided to use the H1 markup tag for the blog title instead of the post title. Since the H1 tag tells the search engines what a page is all about, your site is likely to be considered (for instance) all about fruit, diluting your efforts to send traffic to your page about apples as well as to your page about bananas.

Fortunately, this is not a feature generated by the WordPress core files, but by the themes used with them. The default WordPress themes set the trend, and almost all have followed, with even many premium themes failing to address the problem. This is not so for the Abundance theme, which makes much more effective use of the H1 tag by using it on blog titles.

Theme features such as color pickers and page templates definitely have their uses, but they pale into insignificance beside the importance of a properly placed H1 tag. A quick glance at the source code of a post will reveal will reveal how many theme creators have overlooked this, which is really quite shocking. The most attractive and easily maintained website in the world will not make much money if the search engines can’t find it’s pages.