Add a H1 Tag To Weebly Blog Archive and Category Pages

Weebly Blog achive and category pages don't have H1 headers, which can harm your SEO. Here's my quick method for fixing this.

Titles are important for ranking your web pages in search engines. Some clever coders at EditorTricks have found ways to make your blog's titles into SEO-friendly h1 tags. I've used their tutorial to great success.

I thought that would be that in terms of SEO for my blog. But how wrong I was. I ran my webpage though Neil Patel's free audit tool, and found that my main blog page was coming up with a warning. "Title too short". The title it thought I had was "Blog - Jessica Amber". Auto-generated, and definitely short. But Weebly doesn't offer any setting or method to change that title.

This isn't just relevant to SEO. What if you want one title to appear above every blog post, including your category and archive pages? It improves branding, and can give more consistency to your blog.

Step 1. Open Editor

In Weebly, go to the Theme tab, then click Edit HTML/CSS at the bottom left of the page.

Step 2. Open ​layout.tpl

In the left column of website parts, click Blog, then click layout.tpl

Step 3. Add code

In the code box, under the line <td valign="top">, add the following code:

​<h1 style="color:lightgray">YOUR TITLE HERE</h1><br>

You can change the colour as you see fit. I made it light grey so it didn't compete for attention with the individual blog post's titles. And the <br> at the end just adds a bit of breathing room.

Here's how the whole code should look:

{{!
    The overall layout for a blog's sidebar and main content area.
    NOTE: "blog-sidebar" is a required class for the editor to function correctly.
}}
<tr>
    <td valign="top">
<!--17 June 2020 testing if i can add a h1--><h1 style="color:lightgray">Jessica Amber's Blog</h1><br>
        {{{main_html}}}
    </td>
    {{#has_sidebar}}
        <td class="blog-sidebar" valign="top">
            {{{sidebar_html}}}
        </td>
    {{/has_sidebar}}
</tr>

Step 4. View Result

This code has added a subtle title to the whole blog, so readers will always know where they are, and the presence of this h1 tag will help the page rank better in Google search results.

That's the lot!

I hope this mini-tutorial has been helpful for you. If you have any questions, don't hesitate to leave a comment, I'm always happy to help in the Weebly community where possible.

Peace, love and sunshine (even though it may be raining),
​Jessica