All your blog posts and every page on your site have a title; in web language (HTML), these titles are represented by a tag called the H1 tag.
Concretely, the H1 title of your web page content is one of the elements that will help Google rank your pages in its index.
When crawling bots like Googlebot browse your website, they record your page information. Once the crawl is complete, Google sends this information for indexing. The H1 tag will therefore indicate the main subject of your content to Google's algorithms, which can then categorize your page URL under the appropriate topic.
The consequences for your visibility in search engines are mathematical:
- If your H1 is poorly optimized, your page will not be ranked for the right topic.
- If you are not classified in the correct category, your page URL will not appear in response to your target audience's queries.
- Your content production will have been for nothing!
We may have exaggerated a little—H1 is not the only element that will allow Google to identify the subject of your web content, but it is an essential ranking factor and you must not neglect it!
The H1 tag
The <h1> title is the most important and most visible on your page, which is why it is associated with the main heading. It is the first to appear.
Because of its importance, it is recommended to include a keyword, as Google will give it more weight.
Regarding how many <h1> tags to use on a web page or blog post, the question is debated. John Mueller, Webmaster Trends Analyst at Google, stated in a 2017 tweet that this number depends, clearly indicating that there is no fixed rule on the matter.
How to optimize your H1 tag?
To improve your organic SEO, the H1 tag of your editorial title should meet these criteria:
- Be doubly unique: although there are no predefined rules, it's preferable to use only one H1 attribute per page. One page = one topic. The same goes for its content—write an original title to avoid duplicate content.
- Your main keyword must absolutely be present in your H1 because it will define the subject of your content.
- Avoid long editorial titles and follow Google's advice, which recommends a length between 5 and 8 words, or about 70 characters.
- Neither too long nor too short, a title under 30 characters is not good for your SEO. Try to expand your title with a semantically rich field.
The importance of your H1 for the user experience
Never separate user experience from SEO optimization—user satisfaction is a key ranking criterion for Google.
Write an attractive and explicit title tag. Your reader must immediately understand the topic and your title should make them want to continue reading.
Other tags for SEO
How many tags should you use?
You are completely free regarding how many times you use hn tags. You can include all of them, or none at all.
Obviously, for readability we recommend including a few tags to give your text some basic structure, especially when it is divided into several parts.
You can also have multiple <h2>, <h3>, <h4>, etc.
H2 and H3 tags
The <h2> tag is used for an article's subheadings and allows you to highlight the different sections of your page.
This tag is also taken into account by Google, allowing you to insert a keyword, a synonym of the one used in your <h1> tag.
The <h3> tag should also contain a keyword, but its real use lies in the structure of your text. Thanks to it, you can space out your article and bring out its depth.
H4, H5 and H6 tags
As mentioned earlier, these three tags are used less often.
They still have their place in very long texts, in sidebars, or in the breadcrumb trail.
Others use the <h4> to <h6> tags for stylistic reasons, but remember that these tags are meant to delimit the importance of your different sections. If you want to style certain titles or phrases, you should do it with CSS.
Does order matter?
The W3C recommends not skipping levels.
You must keep a logical order; therefore the main title will be associated with <h1>, subheadings with <h2>, and sub-subheadings with <h3>.
Also, avoid inserting an <h4> directly after an <h2>, for example. An <h3> should be placed between those two tags.
You now know how to use <h1> to <h6> tags effectively.
Beyond all the rules we've stated, you must remain consistent in your text structure and avoid overloading your headings with keywords. You risk making them unreadable and unappealing.
How to spot markup errors?
There are several solutions that will allow you to check that your heading and subheading tags are correctly hierarchized and, if necessary, spot duplicates.
- Solution No. 1: right-click on your web page and select 'View Page Source'.
- Solution No. 2: download the Web Developer extension and once it is added to your browser, in the 'Information' tab click 'View Document Outline'. A page will then open highlighting the hN headings of your page.
However, you'll need to repeat the process page by page. To get a complete listing of your entire site, use an SEO audit crawler tool!
All that's left is to list missing tags, duplicated tags, tags that are too long or too short, or poor tag hierarchy, and then rework your markup in your CMS!
Our tip for optimizing your HTML tags
To optimize the SEO of your pages with quality content that includes the right tags, hire a professional SEO web copywriter on Redacteur.com : you have an HTML formatting option to receive texts already formatted in HTML with the correct tags to save time when integrating content on your website.
