You may not be aware of it but your website may be missing one of the most fundamental, and most beneficial tags in web design. Most web designers know the importance of having good quality content on their website and they are aware of the importance of having a relevant search engine title tag in order to boost their website rankings. This article discusses the importance of having a H1 tag in each of your web pages and why a H1 tag is a web design must have.
First of all, I’ll start out be explaining exactly what a H1 tag and other header tags are.
A heading element is basically an html element who’s content describes the topic of the section that it introduces. Information found in heading tags can be used to construct a table of contents for a document.
There are six levels of heading tags in HTML. H1 is the most important and H6 is the least important. Browsers usually render more important headings such as H1 in much bigger fonts than the less important ones. This sometimes discourages inexperience web designers from using header tags. The display of heading tags can, however be manipulated using CSS as can any other tag in HTML so there is really no reason not to use them.
So Why Is Having A H1 Tag Important?
The reason it is so important is that semantically a web page will have just one level one heading and ideally this heading will accurately describe the content of the web page that follows. When a search engine visits your webpage and analyses its content in order to determine what the web page is about it will look for important tags such as the H1 tag and any other heading tags that are present in order to find their content. A search engine visits a lot of web pages and for each page it must figure out what the page is about and what key words and key phrases are relevant to that page. You can help search engines to rank your web pages more highly by considering the placement of your keywords into various levels of header tags, particularly the H1 tag. Put simply search engines give a lot of weight to key words and key phrases that are found in heading tags.
For this reason, you can look upon the H1 tag as a major opportunity to promote your target keywords and target key phrases in search engines. For example if I were trying to optimize a page for the key phrase ‘web design doncaster’ I could use H1 tags to mark up a page heading that ideally would contain this target key phrase.
Conclusion:
Because a logically structured HTML document contains numerous heading elements to structure the information, search engines place a lot of importance on content found within heading tags. For this reason, heading tags, particularly H1 and H2 can be looked upon as a golden opportunity to optimise your HTML pages for your target keywords. If you aren’t paying attention to the content that you put in your header tags or worse still, don’t have any header tags, you are missing a golden opportunity to help the search engines determine what your web pages are all about.
