How To Use H1 Tags Effectively

May 15, 2009 · Filed Under On Page SEO, SEO Advice 

I recently came across a discussion about H1 tags and how to use them the right way on a web page or a blog post.  In case you’re not familiar with H1 tags, they are the headings located at the top of a web page or a blog post.

There are 6 heading types ranging from most important to least important:

  • H1
  • H2
  • H3
  • H4
  • H5
  • H6

The most commonly used header tags are H1 and H2 tags.  This is because whenever a search engine like Google comes across your web page they’ll look for a header within that page’s content because a header tells the search engines what kind of information is contained on that page.

So if you were writing a page about “rainy days” and rainy days was your keyword for that page you would then place that phrase within an H1 tag to signify that it was important.

Of course, a heading on a page should also make sense to human beings as well.  So we might use:

“How Many Rainy Days Are There In Florida in a Year” and then place this phrase within an H1 tag.

The H2 tags are used as sub-headings.  So if you wanted to expand a little further on the topic in the H1 tag, then you’d add your sentence within an H2 tag underneath the H1 tag.

Some site owners in an effort to game the search engines will place the entire content of the page within an H1 tag hoping that the search engines will give that page more relevance and then fix up the rest of the text on the page so that it looks “normal”; in other words, not large like a typical H1 tag would be.

Not only can this get you red-flagged in the search engines, it will end up making your web page look ridiculous in the event that the rest of the text you wanted to look “normal” doesn’t load or work properly.

However there are times when you may want to use multiple H1 tags on a page and this is perfectly fine, provided it works well with your content.

For example, if you were talking about various different topics on one web page, the titles of those topics could be contained within an H1 tag.

The bottom line is, when you use H1 or H2 tags, keep it simple and use it the way it was meant to be used.  Anything contained within the H1 tag should be the main title of the page and anything in an H2 tag would be the sub-title or the sub-heading.  Rarely will you find a need for H3 – H6 tags but there is sometimes the occasional need for these.

Here’s what one user asked Google’s Matt Cutts about the topic which should help shed a little more light on H1 tags for you.

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