Over the years, SEO has changed drastically. Although the importance of H1 headings has not. Back in the days, H1 tag was a key ranking factor and even today, it holds significance.
But then why do we see so many people outrightly ignore the H1 headings on their website? Is having a title tag without a H1 tag sufficient to rank your page on Google? And what is the best way to harness H1 headings’ full potential?
Many people have asked these questions over and over again. We will try our best to answer these questions below.
But first, let’s understand what are the H1 headings and why you should optimize them.
What are Heading Tags?
These tags are exactly what they sound like. Heading tags allow you to structure your article in various headings. Your visitors can easily navigate through different parts of your article without any confusion.
HTML, which is the basic language of the internet allows you to place up to 6 heading tags on your page. You can see these tags in the image above.
Now let’s move ahead and see why you should use title tag as well as H1 headings on your webpage.
Title Tags and H1 Headings are Equally Important
Many people make the mistake of using only the title tags on their webpage. One of the reasons for this foolishness is their misconception. Most of them believe that H1 tag and title tag are one and the same.
Wrong! Title tags are displayed on the SERP whereas H1 headings are visible on your webpage (Usually on the top of the page)
That is, a good title tag will bring people from Google’s SERP to your webpage.
And a similarly good H1 heading will keep the user’s attention on your webpage.
In most cases, users will decide whether to read your article or not depending upon the H1 heading. You need to place a catchy heading that stands out which also matches the user’s search intent (more on this later).
Once your visitor is hooked into your article, you can lure them even further by placing H2, H3 & other heading tags.
All in all, never ignore H1 Headings on your webpage. Both title tag and H1 optimization will surely boost your Google rankings.
H1 Headings are crawler-friendly tags
Another big reason why you should always put an H1 heading is a web crawler. These are nothing but search engines’ crawlers that fetches information from your page.
H1 and other heading tags are very useful for Google’s web crawler. With a concise and keyword-infused H1 Heading, you can make the crawler’s job very easy.
On the other hand, poor H1 optimization can even lead to Pogo Sticking. Therefore, always try to match the user intent with your H1 headings. Or else, your page will naturally lose rankings on SERP.
Now that you have understood why H1 headings matter for SEO, let’s see how to optimize it.
How To Optimize H1 Headings?
Although there are many different ways to optimize your headings. You should always use the best practices while doing SEO and thus, it applies to H1 headings as well.
Here are some of the key methods which you can follow.
- Use Keyword: Always try to use a keyword in your heading tag. However, avoid keyword stuffing as it would bring penalty to your webpage.
- Hook you readers: Put extra efforts to write a catchy yet descriptive Heading on your webpage.
- Don’t stretch: Make sure that your H1 heading does not cross the 70 words marker. Also, do not leave it short (write at least more than 25 words).
And don’t forget that optimizing your H1 headings is not the finish line. SEO is a much much bigger process and usually, it takes a lot of effort to see its results.
GBIM Technologies is one of the leading SEO service providers out there. Contact us now and see tremendous organic traffic on your website without paying too much.
