How to ensure every page got a <h1> for SEO

[#1]

Hey 🙂

Im pretty new in this technological field of AEM, so be kind please 😄

I got the following request from our SEO-Guy:

He likes to have an <h1> on every page, since this should help to increase our web-rank.

The idea is to ensure and check that the content author creates an h1-headline on every page. 

If the page has no h1, the page should not be published and the author should get a message.

We got a headline-component for that, where the content author can choose between h1<>h6.

There are a lot of pages and the solution should work without changing every of them manually.

So without deep knowledge of AEM I am honestly a little bit lost.

Maybe there is a way to intercept/step into and extend the logic that happens after the publish button is pressed?

Maybe some kind of inheritance for the template of that pages, to include a h1 on every page?

I am open to ideas 😄

Best regards 

Sebastian

[S3bastian · Accepted solution]

@S3bastian 

I had an experience like this myself. It's better to have the SEO team audit and amend pages, as this practice is the most effective. 

If you do not have access to an SEO team, You can download a chrome extension:
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/seo-analysis-website-revi/hlngmmdolgbdnnimbmblfhhndibdipaf

This tool will provide quick feedback by providing a scoring system and recommendations for what you can do to improve SEO. It is a very useful auditing tool.

[S3bastian · Accepted solution]

Sounds like a great tool, thanks for the advice.

But giving SEO responsibility to our content authors is not an option.

Having a SEO Team that manages pages after creation sounds a little bit off, in a best case scenario a created page should be seo optimized.

Thats why I would like to solve the h1 problem automatically 🙂

[Briankasingli · Accepted solution]

You can have your content authors to take a basic SEO course online, with a 1 hour video series, they will understand the need for how pages should be constructed the way they do. Also this will be great on their CV.

[S3bastian]

You can create a small embedded component to all the templates which will print the page title / a page property as an H1. You can write a CSS rule to hide this H1 to be visible on the page. This way you can bring an H1 to all the pages including existing pages.

SEO also advises not to have more than one H1 per page. If that's applicable for you, then we can convert the existing H1- H6 selector to push a <p class="h1"></p> instead of <h1></h1> when they select H1 from the dropdown selector.

[S3bastian]

This sounds like an good idea!

Creating a small component like you mentioned that prints the page title into an H1.

Make the text property of that component configurable so the author is able to customize it.

Make the visibility option configurable, set default to hidden.

Like you mentioned, the page should contain only one H1.

How would I check the content of a page for an already defined H1 and change the output?

[Nirmal_Jose]

Heya, you mentioned there is a component - headline component that is pushing selectable H1 now. You can change how that H1 is delivered. If thats component is pushing H1 into a richtext, then we may need to do a groovy script to update all H1 from the particular property node