WordPress SEO : Optimize your WordPress theme headings (h1, h2, h3)

Headings (H1, H2, H3) are an important SEO factor that is often not optimized in WordPress themes. There is a common agreement that a right headings design make a big difference for search engines as the search engines rely on headings to understand what content is about. Headings SEO (H1, H2, H3) for your WordPress is something you should consider. I'll first give a short overview on why headings might matter, specifically heading1 (H1), and then the changes that might be needed in your WordPress theme.

There are numerous resources on the importance of headings. SEOmoz, with the leading SEO article "Keyword Use Factors" summarizing several SEO consultants, regards  "Keyword Use in H1 Tag" ("Creating an H1 tag with the targeted search term/phrase") as the 4th most important SEO factor. A little lower, ranked 7th most important SEO factor, is "Keyword Use in H2, H3, H(x) Tags" ("Placing targeted terms in the H2, H3 headline HTML tags"). Although comments suggest that headings should be used with care, it still seems to count as it does tell alot about the content and structure of your page.

Problogger recently had a post "Is Your Blog Template Holding You Back?" interviewing 2 experts who commented on "what are some of the things you did to my template to make such drastic improvements":

The theme emphasizes your titles and other important “keyword cues” by properly using header tags (h2, h3, etc.)

True, but especially H1. Looking at Darren's code, headings are not used right. Examining most WordPress themes you'll notice that, strangely, H1 is usually static across all pages pointing to the blog name and that H2 is used for both the post title and sidebar headings. Having a static H1 that has little relevance to your post and having your sidebar's headings marked as keywords for your post is not good practice.

The original WordPress theme I based this blog on had exactly the same problems, and to answer the question of what needs to be done for a drastic improvement I suggest the following quick changes:

• Change your static H1 into something dynamic that matches your current post. If you're currently using H2 for that, change H1 to a DIV class and change H2 to H1. Although Aaron Wall (on SEOmoz) doesn't seem to think it's a good idea to have the H1 heading resemble the page title, I think it's alot better than having a static one, but if you're feeling creative you could think about using H1 for the keywords generated for your post (manually, or by UTW and MetaTags). Just make sure you don't repeat H1 more than once, and so I suggest you don't use the post titles as H1 on index, archive and search, but just on your single posts.
• Preferably, don't use H1 or H2 for your sidebar headings. If you do so, change those to something else, maybe a lower heading like H4, H5.

Suggest readings :

• Blog SEO Tip #7: Heading tags - Scattering
• Importance Of Headings And Sub Headings In Optimizing Pages? - Highrankings
• H1, H2, H3 Placement, per W3C standards - Highrankings
• How Important are H1 (Header) Tags - Cornwall SEO
• Search Engine Optimization for WordPress
• A good bottom line - How Important are H1 (Header) Tags - Search Engine Roundtable

Update (one of the main links gone offline, copy pasted here) :

The default WordPress installation designates the blog title as the H1 tag of the page. Unfortunately it results in the same H1 title on every page.

It is definitely not an ideal for Search Engine Optimization.
All pages should have their own unique H1 title tags containing the keywords which the page is optimized for.

This can be easily fixed:

• navigate to style.css (Presentation - Theme Editor or wp-content/themes/default/style.css)
• change the WordPress h1 definitions to .h1
• change the h2 definitions to h1
• navigate to single.php (Presentation - Theme Editor or wp-content/themes/default/single.php)
• change the h2 to h1
• navigate to header.php (Presentation - Theme Editor or wp-content/themes/default/header.php)
• change the h1 to div class=h1

Different themes might need slightly different modifications.
Optimizing your H1 tags in WordPress this way is a must and one of the first things that should be done to design a search engine friendly blog.