Importance and Benefits of H1 Tags in SEO (Search Engine Optimization)

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is a large concept comprising various aspects that can benefit websites if implemented strategically. One of the essential concepts or aspects of SEO is H1 tag used while formatting articles.

In each article, there are different sub-headings including the main title. The formatting of the title usually differs from the rest of the content. Content is divided into H2, H3, and H4 and further.

What is an H1 Tag?

H1 (HTML) tag is the first header tag visible on the top of the page, as a title. The easier way to understand is to imagine that you are writing an outline of a large article. The main title of the document will be the H1 and the rest of the points will be separated by H2 and H3.

Many get confused between H1 and title. But there are differences between the two:

• The title tag is shown in SERPS (Search Engine Result Pages). It is used as the main heading of the snippet.
• H1 tag is shown to users when they browse the page, but not the title.
• Title act as the strong element in search engine crawlers to show what rest of the content is all about.

Why is H1 tag important in SEO?

One of the important complicated tasks in a search engine understands the main context of the page. When the search engine spider crawls over the content, it reads the HTML code and identifies which sentences are enclosed in heading tags. It is important to use keywords in your H1 tag helping search engines to understand the page.

Another reason to use the H1 tag in the article is it helps users to navigate through the page. When the user reads the H1 title, it gives an idea what the content is all about.

Google doesn’t care how the format of your content is, it cares about the title or header of the site.

Some of the benefits H1 Tag offers to SEO

• It helps accessibility

H1 helps screen reading technology making the process of navigation easier throughout the content.

• Google uses H1 instead of Title tags

In many cases, Google doesn’t find the title tag, so it chooses to extract the title from other elements of the page. This can be H1 tag.

H1 Tag should be slightly different from the page title

Generally, page titles and H1 tags are the same. This is mainly because the CMS are configured accordingly. The best is to place the title of the content on the place above the article body. Match the title of the article page to the title of the article. The word document comes with H1, H2, H3 and further options to format your content title accordingly.