Heading Tag Location Analysis: Small Business and Web 2.0
One of the questions often associated with content optimization is where to place the content on a Web page. Should links be at the top? Should content be at the top? Should headings be one of the first elements on a Web page?
We wonder if there is a rule of thumb Web designers use for placing Web page elements such as links, textual content, headings and images. We recently posted about the heading tags and its use of declaring importance of a Web page content. Therefore, it might be of interest to take a closer look at where on Web pages heading tags are located.
For heading tag location analysis, we have obtained data from two samples of Web sites. Small business Web sites having prominent search result positions with major search engines and Web 2.0 oriented cluster sample.
| Table 1: Heading Tag Location - Web 2.0 | ||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Observed Element | Observed Category | % Found | Average | Min | Max | Median | 80 Percentile Range | |
| H1 Page Location | Web 2.0 Oriented | 58.96 | 9,080.33 | 427.00 | 209,752.00 | 5,796.00 | 1,025.00 - 19,752.40 | |
| H2 Page Location | Web 2.0 Oriented | 54.75 | 14,418.26 | 749.00 | 137,195.00 | 3,968.00 | 2,104.80 - 33,031.30 | |
| H3 Page Location | Web 2.0 Oriented | 41.75 | 17,184.08 | 1,573.00 | 85,586.00 | 11,252.00 | 3,630.00 - 46,547.00 | |
| H4 Page Location | Web 2.0 Oriented | 21.75 | 19,026.21 | 519.00 | 93,069.00 | 27,715.00 | 3,624.70 - 50,846.20 | |
| H5 Page Location | Web 2.0 Oriented | 5.26 | 21,506.73 | 4,257.00 | 96,946.00 | 11,579.00 | 4,884.60 - 63,257.80 | |
| H6 Page Location | Web 2.0 Oriented | 2.82 | 18,886.75 | 1,867.00 | 58,500.00 | 14,665.00 | 1,867.00 - 58,500.00 | |
| HTML Document Length | Web 2.0 Oriented | 100.00 | 29,261.81 | 1,851.00 | 248,301.00 | 21,121.00 | 5,509.00 - 69,100.80 | |
Table 1 shows location of heading tags on the Web 2.0 oriented Web pages. To understand the data we have also included data about Html document size for the same sample of Web sites. The table shows there is a relationship between headings importance and the location with the exception of the H6 heading tag. The reason might be that the use of H1-5 tags is for structure and declaration of content while the use of H6 is for other purposes.
| Table 2: Heading Tag Location - Small Business | ||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Observed Element | Observed Category | % Found | Average | Min | Max | Median | 80 Percentile Range | |
| H1 Page Location | Small Business | 52.75 | 13,152.33 | 1,411.00 | 86,609.00 | 7,038.00 | 2,368.50 - 30,149.00 | |
| H2 Page Location | Small Business | 46.15 | 20,786.05 | 2,215.00 | 64,605.00 | 50,474.00 | 4,826.40 - 47,343.70 | |
| H3 Page Location | Small Business | 34.08 | 28,280.77 | 4,258.00 | 217,571.00 | 11,066.00 | 5,764.40 - 65,002.00 | |
| H4 Page Location | Small Business | 21.99 | 25,474.25 | 7,924.00 | 110,277.00 | 67,308.00 | 11,284.70 - 43,862.60 | |
| H5 Page Location | Small Business | 15.39 | 14,316.21 | 918.00 | 30,330.00 | 19,533.00 | 3,985.00 - 27,717.00 | |
| H6 Page Location | Small Business | 6.59 | 23,110.17 | 7,881.00 | 34,659.00 | 34,618.00 | 7,881.00 - 34,659.00 | |
| HTML Document Length | Small Business | 100.00 | 36,833.53 | 3,789.00 | 220,101.00 | 150,919.00 | 8,192.40 - 73,251.80 | |
Table 2 shows the heading tag location from athe sample of small business Web sites. This data is slightly different from the Web 2.0 data where the H5-6 heading tags appear on average before H3 and H4. The reason for this might be ghosts from the past when the larger headings tags were too big for screen display and therefore Web designers rather used the smaller sizes. Another thing that interests us when looking at the tables for both samples is that on average the Html document size of small business Web sites is larger than the html document size of the Web 2.0 sample.
Chart 1 shows a comparison of average location of heading tags from both samples.
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