OK we’ve just about finished the design of our blog using the xeiro theme. During the design process we discovered some inadequacies regarding some of the header tags H1, H2, H3 etc. To start, the H1 tag was the same for each page, which isn’t exactly optimal for SEO purposes. We’re guessing this is probably standard on most Wordpress blogs, but it’s not optimal, at least by our standards. So we’ve attempted to get it done the way we’ve laid it out on our Header Tag SEO post. Keep in mind we’re not programmers but we did our best.
The Home Page
The home page was actually good. The H1 was at the very top and the H2’s were the post titles. I’ve never really been a fan of the H1 being a link. Just a personal preference, it just doesn’t seem right, and in the past a few SE’s voiced there displeasure about it. So we disabled the link. We did however modify the page link “Home” to basically serve the same function.
Single Post Pages
The post pages had the standard “Blog Title” as the H1. Well that’s ok, but a better way would be to use the actual post title as the H1. To rectify this situation we created another header page, header2.php to be exact, and stripped the standard old H1 tags completely. We then made sure that single.php pulled the new header2.php header (w/ no H1 in it) and added H1 tags on the post title seen here - <h1 class=”heading”><!–p the_title();–></h1>
Category Pages
This particular theme didn’t have a category.php file so we had to make one. Basically we copied the index.php file and plugged it right it. We had another problem now though. We wanted the category name to reflect the H1 and the post titles in that category to be the H2’s. To accomplish this we had to make yet another header file, header3.php, which we copied from the original. In this header file we replaced the meat of the H1 with <!–p single_cat_title();–> That did it.
Archive Pages
Our archived pages didn’t really change much besides removing everything but the post title. This allows you avoid any duplicate content penalties you might recieve in the future. That’s it, you’re done.
In summary, keep in mind we’re not programmers so there may be some easier ways of doing this, but regardless, we did achieve the goal of having the proper H1 heirarchy that we’ve posted at Header Tag SEO.
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This post was written by admin on September 3, 2008
