One of the commonly forgotten aspects of on-page search engine optimization is the proper use of the H1 tag. Or more precisely, the headings tags, from the H1 tag down to the H6 tag, are seldom used by writers for the Internet nowadays.

Power Of The H1 Tag

What many of these website owners, or even SEO practitioners, do not realize is the power of the H1 tag in improving your web page’s search engine rankings.

The H1 tag is actually one of the major factors that would tell the search engine about the subject of what the web page is all about. These headings are there for a purpose – and that is to describe the content that follows it. Therefore, it is important that it should contain the keyword that you are targeting.

Headings, depending on the level, have different sizes which are relatively bigger that the common text to be found in the webpage. H1, as expected, should have the largest font size, followed by the H2 tag, and so on and so forth.

These headings can visually subdivide an article into sections so that it can be a lot easier for the human reader to understand the ideas. Having some texts that are bigger than the others in terms of size gives a visual divider among the different sections of the article. And aside from this, they also give the search engine extra help by telling them what the content is all about.

But what is the difference between an H1 tag a Title tag?

Difference Between H1 Tag And Title Tag

Since the H1 tag is the highest level of heading in the article, isn’t it synonymous to the title?

There may be some debate on this, but to make things simpler (at least, according to my understanding), the Title tag is considered to be part of the document’s metadata, while the H1 tag is part of the document’s content.

And in many cases, the two are actually the same since they describe the content of the blog post of article as a whole.

So, is there no other purpose that we can get from them?

Fortunately, there are other purposes which very few are actually applying into their webpages.

Headings As Tools Of Organization

Using other levels of headings tags, like the H2 and H3 (I find it hard to imagine that a single blog post can have the use of an H6 tag), can make the whole appearance of the article or post more visually organized.

Imagine comparing an article that contains just one size of font to an article that has subtitles that divide. Which one would be easier to read? The one with the subtitles or heading, of course.

And which part of the article would you be reading first? There is no doubt that your eyes would naturally gravitate towards the bigger fonts of the subtitles. Maybe your eyes would scan these subtitles and see which part of the article would interest you the most.

And this is where the power of the heading tags lie in terms of user experience. You can use these heading to draw the readers’ attention into the sections of the article that you want them to read and understand the most.

Now, from the perspective of SEO, I would also suggest that the other levels of headings, like the H2 tag and H3 tag, be used to incorporate the secondary keywords that you are targeting in your blog post. This way, you have many keywords covered, regardless of whether H2 and H3 tags have weight in SEO. Although I would really like to believe that it is not only the H1 tag which matters in SEO. They may just differ in the weight that they carry in terms of effect.

So use your H1 tag, and even the lower level tags wisely. They do not only help the search engines evaluate the content of your webpage, but they are also a very useful and powerful tool in presenting your content.