Header Tags

Few things can more obviously outline the topic of a printed page than a headline. Think of an H1 tag as a headline, because that’s precisely what it is.

Having a headline on a page says to the reader, and to the search engines, ‘here is the topic of this page’, and that’s going to help your rankings for that phrase. Don’t attempt to stuff too much into your headline, just select a primary search phrase to target.

It’s vital to have just one H1 tag per page, and it should cloesly, if not identically, match the title tag of the same page.

Having multiple h1 tags on a page is a bad idea, and may actually subject you to a penalty by the search engines. It’s seen in the same negative light as’keyword stuffing’, and should be avoided.

The employment of more than one H1 tag used to be effective for rankings in 2004 and earlier, but near the start of 2006, the algorithms modified, and the search engines saw those multiple tags for what they actually were… A slightly deceptive attempt to manipulate the search results. Use the primary topic of your article as the headline.

If you feel like there’s a valid reason to use multiple announcements, and in many cases there are, then use H2 tags, H3 tags, and even bolded text instead of additional H1 tags.

If your headline is a long one, you might even consider splitting it onto two lines. In a mega competitive environment, where every bit counts, I’d choose to be more meticulous, and essentially split the line, with a header tag and with bolded text.

This gives the reader precisely what you want them to see, while giving an even higher percentage of keyphrase importance in the header tag.

*Note – Unless you’re hand coding the page in Notepad, you’ll probably have to insert a line break in the sentence to be ready to format the two parts independently, then backspace it into place. Front Page and Dream Weaver both wish to format the whole line, and that gets aggravating.

Could this splitting of the headline actually make a difference? Well, remember, it’s still just a very little piece of the’search engine pie’, but all things being equal, yes, I think so. A page with a more relevant header tag to the search phrase will show a better SERP.