Where Have All the H1s Gone?
Posted on 24 August 2009
What the H1!? SEOmoz recently published their Biennial Ranking Factors for 2009, and H1 tags have taken quite the hit in terms of SEO ranking importance. For ages, SEO experts have stressed the importance of the H1 tags for search engine rank, but recently there has been a significant shift in this type of thinking and the SEO world is taking note. So, where does this leave us? Do we abandon the sinking ship known as an H1 tag? No, we don’t, not completely. We just have to re-adjust the way we think of them.
H1 tags are still useful, although probably not for ranking purposes. The H1 is useful for users, it helps establish the hierarchy of the page and highlights important sections. Like I have said a million times (or at least twice) websites should be more about the users than the search engines. I am certainly not minimizing the importance of a page’s rank- I, like every other SEO professional, understand how vital a high page rank is for websites. I just think that ( and call me insane if you wish) the users should take precedence over the search engine. Besides, search engines still acknowledge the H1 and include them as part of their ranking, they just aren’t given the same kind of weight as we previously thought. So, in the interest of the users, here are some H1 tag tips…
- Include keywords. Your H1 shouldn’t be more than one sentence, so choose your keywords wisely. Make sure they flow with the content on that page and provide a good reference for users.
- The chosen keywords should feature at the front of the H1. H1 tags behave like title tags in this way. The search engine will tend to give more weight to keywords that are placed at the beginning of an H1.
- Don’t put all of the text on your page as an H1. Search engines will ignore this and users will find it very unpleasant to look at.
- Appearance matters. Use H1 tags sparsely, they look very out of place when used throughout a page to highlight random sentences or words. Make sure that you place the H1 where it makes the most sense visually within the page while still highlighting your chosen keywords.
- Your H1 should be logical. Don’t stuff a string of keywords that have no relevance to one another within one tag. Since H1’s are losing weight with search engines, the search engines won’t be impressed with a string of keywords and users will simply be annoyed.
As far as other H tags (i.e. H2, H3, H4) go, only use them if you feel really strongly that the visual hierarchy of your page would be compromised otherwise. They have minimal importance when it comes to ranking and don’t have many benefits when is comes to usability either.
Although H1 tags may not be given as much weight as in the past by search engines, they are still very useful to users and shouldn’t be completely abandoned by SEO. It’s just a matter of looking at them from a different perspective- user not search engine.
Other H1 tag resources
* http://www.seomoz.org/blog/seo-best-practices-seomozs-new-policies-based-on-updated-correlation-data
* http://www.seomoz.org/article/search-ranking-factors#ranking-factors
(Photo credit goes to Bern161616 at sxc.hu)
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