Heading Tags Explained

It is often debated that most of the search engines analyze the text inside the heading tags and use it in their ranking process. Most search engines assume that text that is important enough to put in heading tags is also relevant to that page's content. The H1 tag is by far the most important one as it describes the purpose of the whole website. Search engine spiders will use it to score that page's relevancy as well. Make it a more concise version of that page's TITLE tag and include important keywords in it. The sub headers scale down in importance relative to their header tag size, but they're still very useful and you should be sure you include keywords relevant to the page as well.

You should not use heading tags as only a way to format text size and boldness as they are not just about font size, SERPS use them to determine what text is the most important on the page. Knowing that the H1 tag is the most important one followed by H2, H3, H4 and the way down to H6 tag, then it only makes sense to only use one H1 on a single page. To put that in perspective, you can't tell the SERPS that you have multiple things that are MOST important on a page. Your H1 tag is usually the title or the tag line of your website and this tag is usually used in the header section of the website. So in retrospect, you should almost never use an H1 tag in your posts or pages content.

The hierarchy of your heading tags is important on site as well for proper website structure and W3C compliance. As an example, W3C says that a well formed site would have an:

H1

H2

H3

H2

H3

H4

But never

H1

H3

H2

You can clearly see that the second set of headings are out of rank and order? You need to decrease and increase tags in order and should not skip from an H1 tag to a H3 tag without putting an H2 in between the two.

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