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I would like to make my H1 title it a link to the homepage:
So my usable title would look like...
<h1><a href="/">Widget World</a></h1>
Will Google penalize me for this?
Related thread: heading 1 Tags - Still Relevant? [webmasterworld.com]
I would use an image with alt tag.
[w3.org ]
"The title is generally duplicated in an <h1> element towards the top of the page. Unlike the title, this element can include links, emphasis and other HTML phrase elements."
Thus, I know what I am doing is acceptable according to W3C, so the only question that remains is...
Will Google penalize for it?
I would not do this myself. I think you'll get better results with stronger ranking on page-related keyword phrases by keeping <H1> relationships very straightforward and page specific. You can (and usually should) put a consistent Home Page link anywhere you want on every page, but crossing that practice with the page heading seems to create an uneccessary confusion, IMO.
listen to >> tedster.
so making it a link to the homepage is semantically completely nonsensical, and unintuitive to the visitors.
SN
For example...
Imagine a website which consist only of 1 article about widgets. The article is about one very specific kind of widgets, and there are 3 pages to the article. It is perfectly reasonable to have each page contain <h1>Widgets Explained</h1>, and a sub-heading that says page 1, page 2, etc.
While my website is not quite the same as that above, it is similar.
I'm asking this question because I thought I read somewhere once that Google penalized sites for including anything other than text between <h1> and </h1>.
Either the pages are about different things (like page 1,2 and 3 of an article) or the are about hte same (the article randomly jumbled and mixed across equally relevant pages perhaps?)
maybe you hsould try:
<h1>Widgets Explained Page 1</h1>
<h1>Widgets Explained Page 2</h1>
<h1>Widgets Explained Page 3</h1>
But I'm having the sneaking suspicion you'Re not after hte usability practices for the heading tags, but after good Google SEO tactics.
Think hard about what makes sense for the visitor, google ranking will come on it's own.
I've started doing that with surprisingly great success.
SN
I DO NOT use a logo/image on my website. I use <h1> instead.
Not everyone uses graphics on their websites. I absolutely agree with Jakob Nielsen. If you can use text to communicate the same thing as an image, use text.
Imagine Amazon.com did not use a image logo but simply text saying "Amazon.com" on every page. It would logically make sense, since this is the highest hierarchical (sp) heading, that the text would be inside <h1> tags.
For example, if you look at the current Amazon.com homepage, you would use...
<h1>Amazon.com</h1>
<h2>Welcome</h2>
The "Your Store" page would look like...
<h1>Amazon.com</h1>
<h2>Your Store</h2>
...etc.
If you had no logo/image of Amazon.com, it would make NO SENSE to the user to use:
<h1>Welcome</h1>
and...
<h1>Your Store</h1>
...since you would be removing those headers from their context, which is as a subsection of Amazon.com.
Since usability guidelines suggest that the logo should be a link to the homepage, but in this case, the logo is replaced with <h1> text, I believe that the <h1> text should be a link to the homepage.
Of course, in this case, having <h1>Amazon.com</h1> link to anywhere other than the homepage would be VERY confusing.
<H1> is designed to contain the page's heading. That's the definition of the H1 element. You can use a text substitute for a logo image without misusing the <h1> tag. By using <h1> this way, you are deciding not to apply one tool in the multi-layered toolbox of SEO. So you just use the other tools. No biggie.
You are right in that I have, more or less, decided to use the link to the homepage in my <h1> tags. I do appreciate your suggestions though.
Most importantly though...
I will definitely change my mind if anyone here has evidence that I might be penalized for it by Google.
