Can each article have a heading, '<h1>' or should the heading in, say, the second article be '<h2>'?

Answer 1

The Headings should give your Document a Structure. There should be only one Main Header <h1>. The next Headers should be of lower Level - <h2>, <h3> and so on - in Order of the Relevance.

Answer 2

I heard that too.

The first thing to understand is that the more important search engines (any one that you would want to optimize for) use proprietary algorithms. That means even the big SEO firms are guessing as to which practices are optimal and which are suboptimal, unless they have put a direct question to the search engine company and received a direct answer confirming or denying an assumption. Most of the time, they are either reading far between the lines based on information released by these search engine companies, or they have performed extensive A/B testing to come up with a statistical inference.

In this particular case, I have yet to see sufficient evidence to conclude that using a single h1 per page is best practice, even by people who write extensive articles and swear by this as their rule of thumb.

Would love to see evidence to the contrary though. 🙂

Answer 3

It's up to you. I've done:

<article>
<h1></h1>
<h2></h2>
<h3></h3>
<h3></h3>
<h1></h1>
<h2></h2>
</article>

I've also done:

<h1></h1>
<article>
<h2></h2>
<h3></h3>
<h3></h3>
</article>

I don't think it matters much, to be honest. I focus on assigning different styles to the heading levels and using the ones that look the best in whatever context I'm using them in.

Answer 4

Thanks to the both of you.

Answer 5

I heard is good to use one h1 tag per page becouse of SEO(search engine optimization). It's just better for web page to be find in the abyss of the internet.

Answer 6

Yes each article can have a heading, because heading is used to index your page structure and content.

Answer 7

Don't use multiple h1 for 1 page. In this app I have seen example with 2 <h1>. It is not good for SEO (the example: html > html 5 > section)

Answer 8

I have read that multiple h1s don't necessarily harm seo, as long as the page is organized properly. However, for accessibility purposes, it is beneficial to use one h1 tag and then traverse down the hierarchy of h-tags. Read more here: https://webdesign.tutsplus.com/articles/the-importance-of-heading-levels-for-assistive-technology--cms-31753

Answer 9

Interesting article. I wonder why screen readers are programmed in that way. It would've been nice if the article gave a brief bit of background on that. I tried to follow some of the links, but the reasons didn't seem readily available.

Other than blog articles and Wiki articles, I don't run into very many use cases in my front-end work that are more newspaper-like than a general showcase (of a series of projects or aspects of a company, for example).

I suppose the workaround would be a hidden level 1 heading (in say a company logo or something)? Seems a bit redundant with a hidden <title>...

"Screen readers announce the page title (the <title> element in the HTML markup) when first loading a web page."

https://webaim.org/techniques/screenreader/

Answer 10

You may use <h2> for sections of an article. It will be better than using multiple <h1>. P. S. : my exp. in SEO is more than 3 years

Answer 11

I get that the recommendation is multiple h2s 😋 but it doesn't seem better to have no h1 than multiple (if having just one doesn't make sense for the use case).