There are various on-page and off-page elements which are considered as influential search engine ranking factors for any website. While search engine algorithms are continuously evolving and there are different trends over the time, importance of many factors have been reduced. On the other hand Google introduces new elements which play an important role in the search engine ranking of the website. While doing SEO of any website, you need to take care of all such elements and you have to make sure that your site has all those elements which are counted as a ranking signal. Using H1 tag for heading text of your page is one of the ranking signals for search engine like Google which has its own importance since the beginning.
Each page should have H1 tag for it’s main heading text to tell about objective of the page.
H1 tags help to have semantic structure of the webpage. With the introduction of Google Hummingbird algorithm, importance of heading tags have been increased even more. Hummingbird facilitate rich snippets or rich answers with semantic search result and knowledge graph results in SERPs which fulfils user intent behind the search query and having long tail keywords in your headings tags you can have advantage over competitors.
Obviously, you need to follow hierarchy while adding heading texts in the form of H1 tag for topic on page followed by H2, H3 … so on for subheadings or subtopics.
There are various arguments over how to use H1 tags? One of them – More than one H1 tag on a page : good or bad? See Matt Cutt’s video to get answer on this.
Apart from this, I have two strong cases for you to understand how H1 should not be?
Case 1:
Many webmasters think that they just have to use H1 tag to get ranking and they just use it as a HTML element. They use this H1 – as a HTML element anywhere on the webpage. Web masters use any text on webpage to modify their tags from <p> or <span> or from something else to <H1> and they think job is done. But its not the case. <H1> should highlight the objective of the page. Each webpage should have heading text that can say something what the page is about. And that heading should be enclosed within a H1 element. So that Google can have sense of page’s objective and its semantic structure.
Case 2:
Few brands or websites use heading in image form and not in textual format. That is heading is an image. So it cannot be read by Google or any search engine. Google can not have sense of objective of the page or semantic structure of the page. Question may arise that you can have image alt or title attribute for this header image. But having that would tell about this particular image only and will not convey anything about entire webpage. It can not have emphasis on page hierarchy. It can highlight page’s objective.
Conclusion:
By looking at both the cases, we can conclude that page must have heading text that tells about the page and it must be enclosed within <H1> – HTML element , so that it shows most important text among webpage’s elements hierarchy as well as it can be readable by search engine crawler.
Thank You.
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