Sunday, December 20

Why Change Your Headings From H3 to H2?




You'd be surprised to learn that, if you look into the source of the blogger pages for individual posts, you'd see that the headings are h3. I was investigating google search results where my blog was appearing on page 1 when I realized that! I'd think google would understand that and treat them as most important headings in the post for SEO purposes. But does it? And moreover, do other search engines understand that a h3 header is actually the main header of the post? I wonder where my blogger pages would be if all post titles were h1 instead of h3!

Ideally, you would want to change all post titles to h1 however in blogger, h1 is "reserved" for the blog title. We want to avoid more than one h1 item, based on several advice on the internet. But we don't want h3 either. So we go for h2.
If you don't want to play guessing games with search engines, you'll change this with me. Here's how.

Go Settings/Layout/Edit Html/Expand Widget Templates. Search for post.title and you'll find something like that:


<b:if cond='data:post.title'>
      <h3 class='post-title entry-title'>
     <b:if cond='data:post.link'>
       <a expr:href='data:post.link'><data:post.title/></a>
     <b:else/>
        <b:if cond='data:post.url'>
          <a expr:href='data:post.url'><data:post.title/></a>
        <b:else/>
          <data:post.title/>
        </b:if>
     </b:if>
      </h3>
    </b:if>


Go ahead and replace h3 with h2:


<b:if cond='data:post.title'>
      <h2 class='post-title entry-title'>
     <b:if cond='data:post.link'>
       <a expr:href='data:post.link'><data:post.title/></a>
     <b:else/>
        <b:if cond='data:post.url'>
          <a expr:href='data:post.url'><data:post.title/></a>
        <b:else/>
          <data:post.title/>
        </b:if>
     </b:if>
      </h2>
    </b:if>


Save your template and you're done! Just to make sure, you only changed 2 digits total! Simple as that!

Credit for the code change directions goes to: http://www.magznetwork.com/tutorials/complete-seo-guide-for-blogger-templates.html

[UPDATE] Well, it turns out this is not the end of the story. Turns out all the widgets in the sidebar have H2 headers also by default! Went ahead and changed all of those to H5! This will improve the SEO I am sure! It's quite a few more changes - two changes for each widget - but these changes are also simple changes. I recommend you do that too!

11 comments:

Anonymous said...

Thanks for this code. I will try this one.

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sp33dw0rld said...

thanks for the information

Referral Secrets said...

Hello I see you have not posted in a while. I hope to see more from you soon. It was good stuff and hope you can give us some more tips. Is the dofollow movement still alive? Should I make my blog dofollow and announce it? What longterm benefits are there? Anyways cheers!

Mkcoy

tutorial blogger said...

I agree it would be important for SEO.
How about the use of italic, bold, emphasized Is it important too ?
Thanks a lot

call Pakistan said...

I didn`t know that it is important (the size of the header). I`m sure it is important for SEO.
Thank you for sharing.

car storage madison said...

Interesting but why is it important to change around all these H tags?

seo melbourne said...

I like it so much. It was good stuff and hope you can give us some more tips. Everybody knows that dofollow is very cool for any website. Do follow blog plays a main role for the increase a website page rank in the seo work. Thanks for it.

YOGYAKARTA said...

wow this really good blog content

burn the fat build the muscle said...

I never know that this is important things to do and i don't know either about this code so i guess i have to learn from it and try type those code to my blog and see how is it works.

Android software development said...

Thanks! But H3 heading won't help in your seo if you don't have a really strong strategy.

Unknown said...

Military Challenge Coins
HMM! Interesting post thanks for share.

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