What is an H1 tag and does it matter to the SEO of your website?
An H1 tag is the visible heading on a page. The heading on this blog page is “SEO Speak: H1 Tags” and the H1 tag on our homepage is “Search Engine Optimisation Services”.
The H1 tag on your pages is important for the SEO of your website as it tells Google what each page is about and if these are written with keywords in them this can help your rankings. This can be used to reinforce the relevancy of specific pages on your website to the keywords you are promoting. The benefit of having an optimised H1 tag on the page is that one of the first things that Google sees on visiting the page is a mention of your keyword. Google and the other engines have also said that they give more relevance to the H1 tag over bold or strong tags.
Although things like the title tag of the page are more important from an SEO point of view there are definite benefits of having H1 tags on each page.
An H1 tag is also useful for your customers as it lets them see what the page they are on is about clearly when they first load the page.
Each page of your website should have one H1 tag on it and it is best if this tag is not too many words long. Having the first paragraph of copy on your page as the H1 tag is not good for the SEO of your website as this doesn’t deliver a strong keyword message, unless of course you have a 30 word key phrase you want to rank for!
Make sure that you don’t make the logo of your website the H1 tag as not only does this make the H1 tag on every page the same but it is an image which isn’t’ as good for the SEO of your site. Another mistake often made on websites is to have more than one H1 tag on a single page of the site which dilutes the effectiveness of these tags.
If you have a CMS powering your site make sure that the H1 tag which displays on each page is not “connected” to the title tag of the page. If there is a connection the title tag of a page will automatically display as the H1 tag on the page and you will have no ability to change this. You also need to be able to manually specify the H1 tag, rather than it being set by the CMS.
Related posts:
