How’s Your H1 Tag Hanging?

Writing by Nick Stamoulis Tweet

Mike McDonald at WebProNews wrote a great article on SEO ranking factors and which ones are most important right now. Of course, it’s not all encompassing. It only touches on a few of them. But one thing I noted was that Mike and Rand Fishkin agree that H1 tags are not that important for ranking. Here’s what he says about the subject:

H1 Tags – A couple of years ago, making use of H1 and H2 tags on selected areas of your HTML code kind of came into vogue. The rationale was the search engine spiders interpreted H1 tags as a signal that ‘hey, this text is important because it’s bigger’. Of course the proliferation of .css meant that you could throw H1 tags pretty much anywhere and everywhere on your page and just take care of how things looked to people with stylesheets.

That this was ever an effective ranking tactic or strategy is somewhat debatable. However, currently, while H1 tags aren’t going to hurt you, they don’t seem to be much of a factor.

First, let’s clarify something. H1 tags in and of themselves aren’t that important. No H1 tag is going to push you up to the top of search engine rankings. But H tags in general, if used properly, can be a benefit. The problem with some webmasters is that they have misused H tags.

Spam hurts. Can we all agree on that? Even H-tag spam is self-dustructive. It’s like sticking a needle in your arm. You may not be an alcoholic, but if smoke crack then you’re still destroying body. Misuse H tags and you could be killing your SEO. Plain and simple.

So What’s The Proper Way To Use H Tags?
The best way to use H tags, in my humble opinion, is in the classic newspaper style. Newspapers have always published the largest headlines at the top of the page and made the headlines increasingly smaller down the page toward the bottom. Using this classic design style for your web pages still works. It’s a quality content issue. Such decreasing h tag styles makes reading easier on human eyes and search bots don’t seem to mind either.

Now, will that make your pages rank better? I don’t think it will make them rank any worse. But if you have 12 H1 tags down your page because you think they’ll give you special search engine favor then you are likely to find out that such H-tag spamming will just end you up in the SEO gutter. Therefore, H tags can help you if they aren’t hurting you. In other words, the absence of a negative is a positive.

So, with that in mind, how’s your H1 tag hanging?