Why you are Shooting Yourself in the Foot by not Employing H1 Tags for SEO

In one of the latest MoreVisibility YouTube videos, I explained the importance of utilizing your page headlines for SEO Purposes. Entitled “H1 Tags for SEO“, I talked briefly about ensuring that your page headlines are properly using the H1 tag.

It is the general consensus that Header tags are the 2nd most important tag next to the title. As much as possible, ensure that the text in the H1 tag is the same as your title tag; that level of redundancy between your Titles and your H1 for the page will send a signal to the search engines that the  page is about a specific keyword.

Use other tags (h2 tags, h3 tags etc.) if you need multiple headers. This will ensure that the search engines know that anything wrapped in the H1 is much more important than other headers (or sub-headers) used on a page. Also, make sure to not abuse your H1 tags. Don’t put whole paragraphs in a header and don’t use multiple h1 headers on the same page. This will seriously dilute their effectiveness and could get you penalized with Google.

Some have said in the SEO community that the H1 tag is not given as much weight by Google anymore. However, until Google officially says anything about specifically ignoring an element on a page (like they did with the keywords meta tag), it is safe to assume that using the H1 tag for the primary keyphrase on the page is good for SEO.