The Importance of Heading Tags in your SEO Strategy
By: Traian N.
Submitted: 2009-03-31 07:14:27 | Word Count: 571
If you are not already using headings on your website, now it is the time to start using them. Why? They will help you improve your website ranking in the search engine. The heading tags are HTML tags that are used to hierarchically organize the design and the content of a web page. These “H” tags range from H1 to H6 (the short form of Heading 1 – most important, to Heading 6, the least important, and define text in header font and prominence. In established site, tags are used to give the page structure of “what” the the page is about. It suggests both to human visitors and search engines the ontology of the page and how important a page section is based on the section heading type, H1 or H6. By doing this, visitors can understand the pages in better manner and website can boost in search engines result.
There are six levels of heading tags in HTML: H1, H2, H3, H4, H5, H6. The H1 tag heading should contain the most important section of the site and often it is a good idea to match the page title tag (title of the website page). The H2 tag is next important tag which is used for subheading. This tag is lesser important than the H1 tag, but still of high importance for search engines. The H2 tag can support H1 tag by repeating the most important keyword in both H1 and H2. While the H3 tag is for titles of different sections in content, it is not recommend to be used as the title of page. The H4, H5, and H6 tags are used for sub-heading to the content section or the information in the footer.
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The H1 tag is the most important of the six “H” tags in SEO strategy. It should be placed at the top of content so that visitors can easily understand what the content of the page is about.. This heading should accurately and briefly describes the content of the web page that follows and it should contain your main important keyword. Do not overuse it, meaning do not use the H1 more than once on the same web page The search engine robots will visits your website pages and analyze their content. While trying to determine the main theme (please read, “keyword”) of a specific web page, The robots will look for important tags such as the H1 and other heading tags that are present to find the content. If there is a semantic relationship between the page title, the H1 and H2 tags and the body text content, chances are that the robots will properly identify the main theme of the page and will give it a boost in search results related to that keyword.
Search engine robots are “crawling” as many web pages as they can find on your website, and for each page they will try to figure out which keywords and key phrases those pages are relevant for. To rank your website higher in search engines, it is helpful to consider placeming the most important keywords into various levels of header tags.
