H1 Tag

[paddy]

How important H1 tag you think is in todays SEO? does it hold same value as before?

[Mr P Panther]

Hi Paddy,

You should really have a H1 tag as a header on the page as a minimum, and it does let the search engines know its more important than other text.

You can always use H2 for sub headings to let your visitor scan the pages easier and I suppose it gives the search engines a little hint, but not so much as to worry about it.

Just keep your content real.

Mr P

[onehandharry]

I've done a few tests with H1 tags on a small site I have for a friends business and noticed Google liking my H1 tag and bumping it up a few for that reason alone I believe.

[wink0r]

You should really have a H1 tag as a header on the page as a minimum

This is one of my design pet peeves. Many templates and CMSs dump the site name into the h1 tag. That is a waste of the h1 tag. Your h1 tag should be unique to the page and you should have only one h1 tag per page. Your page keyword should be prominent in your h1 tag and your page title tag. The heading tags give hints to the SEs about the order of importance of the content on the page. The most important thing on the page should go in the h1 tag and supporting content should go into h2 - h6 by descending order of importance. Multiples of the lower tags are fine and should define points of equal importance.

[bluearrow]

+1 for what Winkor said.

H1 should be used for the main keyword of the page. In simple, it tell search engines which is the main keyword or keyword phrase of the page.

[Eston55]

H1 why even ask. If it's even 5-1% worth you should have it. I always H1 my main keyword. I don't even care how much of a difference it is.

[Ammy Tisdale]

Yes, it holds the seo value after the Title because Google reads it also after reading the title.

[dominicexcel]

Despite not knowing the real significant of it. I still try to do it for all my blog post and i think it still plays quite a big role in online SEO effect.

---------- Post added 11-02-2011 at 05:10 PM ----------

So sorry, i mean on page SEO effect...

[isoftx]

Yes h1 still plays important role in improving the ranking of webpage.

[enni]

H1 tag are most important part of seo which is the header tag situated body of the website.Through h1 tags search engine come to know about the site content detail.You can ever use the h1 tag as the title for the content present on that particular page.The tag produced by h1 are of largest form, and are very important requiring to be used independently having same html commands.

[P4tr4sch]

I dont know if it is the same at g...com but on go....de the H2 tag is stronger than the H1 tag.
That is because h1 in most cases is the Website name and sometimes a claim and it's abused by many, but at H2 you get the content of the pages. So g..... switched the weight of H1 and h2.

[MattewHayden555]

How important H1 tag you think is in todays SEO? does it hold same value as before?

From the day one, it has not much value as like today. Google and other search engines prefer the text based backlinks.

[imelbisnis]

Place the h1 tag is important for SEO, just as important also for other tags like h2 and h3. but for some template settings like wordpress and blogspot blogs, the h1 tag has been set automatically to each post title. So we just add a tag to h2 and h3 in article. I think this is quite helpful to top positions in SERPs.

[akira07]

Since h1 is so important, I agree with wink0r. I’ve found so many templates (even the premium one) isn’t SEO friendly which mean you need to edit the coding by yourself if you don’t want it hurt your SEO effort. Anyway, can I state the name of bad template here?

[elizabethjean733]

H1 tag is very important and help you to get attraction of search engine because when search engines read your website they give importance to those keywords which have H1 tags and then importance for H2 tags, but keep in mind that you should try to set H1 tag on one page mean on single page there should be one H1 tag.

[XpopX]

Can we just put one H1 tag in the page, means no other tag and just text with it ? will it help to rank for main keyword only ?

[pot-seo]

yes it still does, well I would say the H tags are almost equal now, but much better than <b>

[Magento developers]

Yes of course, H1 tag is one of the on page factor, so you need to optimize that.

[seobunny]

[wink0r]

Straight from the horses mouth and probably that is the way that Google operates, but it is not good design practice. Remember, Google is the one that provides us code to put on each of our pages that does not validate with the w3c validator. They are not really an authority on web design.

Semantical tagging with <h*> tags gives your page its hierarchy. The various levels should denote equal importance. The comparison with the offline world is with a book. The title of the book is the h1. If you have several sections to the book the sections would be h2s. The chapters, in this case, would be h3s and divisions within the chapters would be h4s and so on. If you need more than one h1 tag on a page you should probably be making 2 pages.

The main problem that I see with h1 tags is that many templates throw the site name in an h1 tag. This gives the site name equal value to the actual page title. For SEO purposes why would you want to split the value of your page title with your site name? People searching for your site name will find you anyway.