Is it possible to improve your Google search results by employing the proper keywords in your H1 tags?
What’s more, how many H1 tags should you use on each page?
Over the years, there has been a lot of controversy and confusion regarding how Google views H1 material.
So, are H1 tags a ranking component for Google? Let’s see what happens.
Over the years, several “best practises” and suggestions for H1 tags have proliferated. Among them are the following:
- To rank better for specific keywords, you should employ many keyword-rich H1 tags.
- Google will penalize you if you use more than one H1 tag per page. (How about an automatic downgrade? Is there a manual penalty? In the town square, fifty lashes with a wet noodle?).
- To tell Google what phrases you want to rank for, start your H1 tag with your top keyword and continue with your secondary keywords in H2 tags and so on.
- Only one H1 tag should be used, and it should be the first text element on the page.
- I don’t blame you if you’re perplexed by the contradicting information available on this subject.
On-page text components were strongly weighted features in the Google search algorithm in the early days of SEO.
The words utilized, their placement on the website, and the font size they appeared all notified Google how significant those phrases were. That’s how Google calculated a webpage’s relevance to a particular query.
Because it didn’t have much else to go on in the late 1990s and early 2000s, that’s what Google did.
H1 variables, like so many other ranking criteria before them, were soon exploited as a simple approach to alter ranks. Over-optimizing H1s drew the attention of the Spam Team, and they were devalued as a consequence.
H1 tags and other structural HTML components continue to aid Google in determining how consumers perceive the information on any particular site. They continue to assist Google in determining a webpage’s relevancy and semantic structure.
They help the algorithm figure out what the page is about, who it’s for, and why it is or isn’t the best response for a specific query.
Headings are a Google ranking element, according to Mueller.
That being said, it doesn’t mean much on its own. Trying to use H1 to manipulate the SERPs by using a large number of them, cramming them with keywords, or using CSS to conceal a whole page of H1 simply doesn’t work.