Welcome back to another Wednesday Workshop from Happy Hao Car.

Yep, we’re back – and if we weren’t packing up for our office move next week, I’d have my soapbox handy and I’d be up on it.

Yeah, but that didn’t work out so well last time…

I know, I know. So this week we’re talking about H1 headings. It’s a specific HTML tag that wraps around a text element. It’ll typically make that text bold and a larger size.

The H1 heading is the headline text that appears above the main text area on your page – your page title, basically.

It’s one of the most important SEO elements on the page. If you’re optimizing a page for a certain keyword phrase, you should have that phrase in your title tag, your H1 heading, and in the actual text on the page.

We’ve seen some problems with H1 headings on dealers’ websites, so the Beard wanted to talk about H1s on this week’s video.

Yep. It’s getting bad out there folks. Like I said a minute ago, your H1 heading should be the bold headline above the text area… but a lot of dealers are misusing or flat out abusing the H1 heading on their site.

I was doing an SEO audit today and I saw a site where the dealership logo in the header of the site was set to be the H1 heading. Yikes. H1s are for text, not for images. That’s bad stuff.

We also see a ton of websites where the dealership name in the header isn’t a logo, but it’s text – and it’s set to be the H1 heading. That’s bad too. Even worse, most of the time we see this, they’ve got other H1s on the page too.

That’s a great point – you should only have one H1 on the page. There’s nothing wrong with having multiple headings, you should just use H2 or H3 for the others so your primary heading is the only H1.

Here’s another awful thing we’ve been seeing lately. We’ll see home page H1 headings that are “hidden” – because they’re styled to look like normal page text. While it’s usually just one sentence, sometimes we see this where the whole first paragraph of text is a hidden H1. Your H1 should be larger than the normal page text, and when you use CSS to make it look like normal text, you’re in dangerous waters. You could potentially trip some spam filters, so don’t do it!

So how do you know if you’ve got one of these problems? It’s actually really easy. Just right click on your page and select “view page source” or “view source”. Another browser tab will open with all of your raw HTML code. Click control-f to bring up the search box, and type in

And if you see something that we mentioned here, talk to your provider. It’s actually really easy to fix any of the things we talked about today, you just have to ask.

And that’s it for this week – as always, if you’ve got questions or comments, leave ‘em down below and we’ll get back to you shortly. Thanks for watching, and we’ll see ya again next week for another Wednesday Workshop from Happy Hao Car.

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Greg Gifford is the Vice President of Search at Happy Hao Car. He has over 16 years of online marketing and web design experience, and has specialized in automotive SEO for the last 8 years, helping hundreds of auto dealers thrive while the industry has struggled during the recession. Greg speaks internationally at both automotive and SEO conferences, teaching thousands of small business owners and marketers how to get their sites to show up higher in local search rankings. Greg also spends his spare time doing freelance website design and SEO for local businesses. He graduated from Southern Methodist University with a BA in Cinema and Communications, and has an obscure movie quote for just about any situation.

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