Can titles of posts (on boards) be changed from h2 tags to h1 tags?

[Ellen_G]

Hi again!

Is it possible to change a settings for our Community so that the title of a post on a board is tagged as h1? Apparently this could help our content to rank better on Google search results.  I see that in Admin > System > SEO we could change the setting 'Tag to use when showing thread subject on forum', but the default setting is h2 - why? Are there any downsides to changing this from h2 to h1?

I saw a few posts about h1 tags and groups but nothing about h1 tags and posts on boards. 

Any help would be great! 

[MattYap · Accepted solution]

Hey @Ellen_G, while it is possible to change the title of posts to h1 from h2, if there are multiple h1 tags on a page then search engines will heavily penalize you. It is also strongly against accessibility and SEO guidelines to use more than one H1 element per page.

[Parshant]

@Ellen_G 

The <h1> tag should contain your targeted keywords, ones that closely relate to the page title and are relevant to your content similar to boards Title in this case. and most common and recommended practice in SEO that H1 should be used once in a page.

Then <h2> and <h3>Tag can be used as subheading and should be used for post titles. You can example H2 tags as subheadings like the Chapters of a book.

You can use <h1> tag on topic/message page, so it will represent them as post title of the message.

[Ellen_G]

Thank you @MattYap. Just to confirm will search engines 'read' a board page as one page containing multiple h1s (if we change all topic titles from h2 to h1?)

[MattYap]

The board page would be "read" as one page only containing multiple H1 tags.

[MattYap]

Hello @Ellen_G , If one of these responses answered your question. Do you mind marking them as an accepted solution? Thank you!

[beacampos]

hi @Ellen_G  did you ever figure out how to properly tag the title as H1? on the SEO config on Admin panel I also have the same issue, even when I place H1 as the Topic subject, It does not show up properly 😞 I don't know where else this can be defined, if I have to go on the code or something..