Effective search engine optimisation involves many factors. And trying to rank highly within search engine result pages (SERPs) is about providing content that is both relevant and informative; with proper page layout and coding. The coding side is generally taken care of by web developers, however, a lot of consideration should be given to your page headings or specifically the use of heading tags: H1, H2, H3, H4, H5 and H6.
Today, I want to focus just on the H1 tag. Although the others can be used to reflect the document structure:
H1 = Chapter Heading
H2 = Section Heading
H3 = Paragraph Heading
(Using this analogy, I suppose I would use H4, H5 and H6 in a cited block of text that contained headings of its own.
An example of the H1 tag in use is the heading I’ve used on this page: “One for your toolbox: Get it into your Head“, used to define the overall content of the page, and for proper layout. to check it click ‘View’ in the browser links at the top of your screen then click Source/Page Source depending on which browser you’re using.)
Although there is no “sure-fire” way to get to the top of search engine results, by understanding the importance of using H1 tags it will go some way to improve your sites visibility within the search engine results.
Firstly, I see a lot of sites that don’t use the H1 tag – as the font size is large, and because of this many site developers compromise site content for aesthetics. However, although, it’s great to have a site that looks the ‘mutt’s nuts’ but if no-one see’s it then … well, you get the idea… And if it’s not seen then your site won’t benefit you or your audience.
Now, just to clarify things, most of what is shown within the search engine result pages (SERPs) is actually indexed by a by a computer, otherwise known as a “robot”, “spider”, or “crawler”. These are only computers that use what you tell them to build a a list of relevant information and display it as results based on what people are requesting. So, if you don’t tell them the right things how can they display the information correctly?
H1 tags inform the robots that it is the top level heading of your page. Try to think of it as a heading in a newspaper or article – it’s the first thing you see right? And when you read it you decide whether it’s of interest to you now or whether you’ll comeback to it later or not at all! If a heading article doesn’t tell you what it’s about within the first few words, you’ll generally turn the page…
This is no different to a search engine spider, in that if the content isn’t engaging, and it doesn’t state exactly why it is there, then it regards it as being of ‘no benefit’ to include it within high ranking search engine results pages (SERPs).
Most search engines, including Google, allow the words used/found within the H1 tag to boost a page’s relevance, so because of this it’s a valuable tool for improving search engine placement.
If you are using wordpress, typepad, posterous, movable type joomla, drupal, E107, plone etc – just to name a few – to manage your websites’ content, then you can select the H1 tag from the drop down menu contained within the post/article editor.
So, if you haven’t been using H1 tags, it’s time to start doing so…
Note: Heading tags represent only a small portion of search engine optimisation and Website usability.
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