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I'm working with wordpress and avada. In the page title bar settings of each page avada lets you enter a subheader text what is placed in the page title bar directly under the title using .

I'm quite new to SEO and I've found mixed information about this subject online. It isn't clear whether skipping a heading in the situation I'm working with is a bad idea. Most websites say that I should follow the heading level structure, some websites it doesn't hurt to use and skip one level for subheading.

Since the avada theme doesn't let me choose which heading I want, the following question arises: should I really waste time changing the theme in order to implement <2> and subheading for the page title bar, or should I just let it stay the way it is right now using ? Does it really matter for SEO to make this change?

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For SEO, it doesn't matter if you skip one or more heading levels. It does matter that the structure makes sense semantically, and that your more important text is higher up in that hierarchy. It also matters that there's a hierarchy that makes sense.

If you use an H1 and follow it with H3, search engines will assign the same importance to H3 that they would have assigned to H2, because it's the second in the hierarchy.

Sometimes, people will use a heading based on how it's styled in the theme. If you don't like the styling, it's usually pretty easy to override in the child theme, if we're talking popular CMS's like WordPress and Drupal. Search engines are aware of this tendency. With HTML5's section and article tags often containing various levels of headings, sometimes multiple times on a page, search engines look at your overall page hierarchy more than the details of the exact heading level you're using.

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So long as you don't dilute the use of H3 (having 10 of them say...) or use a H2 further down the page that has less relevant content. Google knows all, it will automatically figure out the importance of the content. So long as you use a logical approach.

I would usually prepare my H tags for styling, then use the relevant ones for the headings. This allows you to quickly and confidently generate new pages that follow the same styles throughout the site.

NOTE: this will only work if you consider the content of your site first and set them up (as an example) like this:

H1 - will be used for the page title.

H2 - will always be the heading that overlays my hero images.

H3 - will be text content headings.

H4 - will be titles under images.

H5 - will be tags, categories listed on posts.

Again, just an example.

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  • One should never be using <hx> tags for styling. HTML is about document structure and NEVER styling.
    – Rob
    Feb 12, 2019 at 14:52
  • In my example, this is maintaining document structure. 'this will only work if you consider the content of your site first and set them up'. Feb 12, 2019 at 15:49

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