how to add h1 tag in wordpress homepage in theme

As a SEO specialist, We know the importance of h1 and h2 tag in wordpress website. Here we will show you, how to add h1 tag to wordpress homepage in theme code.

how to add h1 tag in wordpress homepage in theme

There are many custom wordpress themes which has poor SEO. We need check every aspect of SEO friendliness of wordpress theme. recently, we faced same issue with one of our site. When we checked the website in SEO doctor  Firefox addon. We did not find h1 tag on homepage. We got the following message.

When, we checked message. We found following error.

“Fail”,”H1 tag”,”* You have no H1 tags”
“Fail”,”H2 tag”,”* 10 H2 tags found before/without H1 (“Demo post 12″)”

Many custom developer talking about following solution. This will not display h1 to a visitor but will to a search engine.

<h1 style="display: none;"><!--?php the_title(); ?-->

 But we are not agree with above solution. do not use above solution. Google and other search engine did not consider hidden text or very small font words.

Solution

On Home page, For post title tag you should h1 tag. If you use multiple h1 tags in single webpage, that is not harmful. You should use rel bookmark in tag. For home page use following code.

<!--?<span class="hiddenSpellError" pre="" data-mce-bogus="1"-->php if ( is_single() ) : ?>
<h1 class="entry-title"><!--?php the_title(); ?-->
<!--?<span class="hiddenSpellError" pre="" data-mce-bogus="1"-->php else : ?>
<h1 class="entry-title">
php the_permalink(); ?>" rel="bookmark"><!--?php the_title(); ?-->
</h1>
<!--?<span class="hiddenSpellError" pre="" data-mce-bogus="1"-->php endif; // is_single() ?>

Why Rel bookmark is used?

REL=Bookmark Bookmarks are used to provide direct links to key entry points into an extended document. The TITLE attribute may be used to label the bookmark. Several bookmarks may be defined in each document, and provide a means for orienting users in extended documents.

Reference Taken from : http://www.w3.org/MarkUp/html3/dochead.html

Conclusion

You can use style or classes as per your theme requirement.  The h1 is used in header.php for Custom Logo / Site Title, so there should be a H1 there. But If you used only logo image and not used h1 tag on home page than above issue will happen. You can use multiple h1 tags in one webpage. You can check wordpress core themes and their code and refer it. It has best SEO practice followed.

In core wordpress themes, We can see multiple H1 tags with rel bookmark element. So you can use above code in your wordpress theme and increase your website SEO.