How will it effect SEO to have multiple h1 tags on a page?

[GRIP-SEO]

I have a client who recieved this advice from his marketing consultant: "If there are multiple h1 tags on a page, this can confuse Google and it may have a negative impact on the keyword rankings. If you could ask your web developer to go in and remove the h1 tags on the header images that would be helpful. This way it will be easier for Google to index your site and will help your keyword rankings."

How will it effect SEO to have multiple h1 tags on a page?

[BenjaminMorel]

This was a question that was recently raised by somebody else here on the Q&A and you can see the full discussion here. Although the question is slightly different, the answer is the same: it depends which HTML version you are using. If it's HTML4 or XHTML, only use one h1 per page, but if you are using HTML5 you can have one per section. So you could have one in your

<nav>, on in your, one in each of the

<aside>s on your page and one in your

<footer>.

The reason for this is that for HTML4 search engines look at headings to give the page hierachy - remember they only had

s to separate content areas - but HTML5 uses the new semantic elements like

<header>and <fotter>to work out hierarchy, with headings only affecting hierachy within one of those tags.</fotter></header>

</footer>

</aside>

</nav>

[Andy.Drinkwater]

Sorry, but have to disagree a bit as having multiple H1's isn't the issue that most think it is, or once was. One of my own sites has 20 H1 tags (purely by chance as it is a single page design, but it's a long story), and that site ranks top 3 for a number of highly competitive phrases with almost half a billion results.

No, it isn't best practice and I wouldn't advocate doing this, but it isn't a major ranking factor.

-Andy

[iSTORM-New-Media]

Your header images should not have h1 tags in them as well because then every page is going to have the same h1 tag with the same keyword - making it so that your are optimizing against that keyword on all your other pages.

[vmialik]

Well said iSTORM! To add using images in H1 tags is not very search engine friendly or natural approach. H1 tags are to be used for text only, so adding images may not work to your advantage.

[iSTORM-New-Media]

Google looks at h1 tags as clues to what the page's content is about. If you have multiple h1 tags with different keywords then it is difficult for Google to contextualize the page.

Best practice: one h1 tag with the keyword or theme you are trying to optimize for.