HTML heading tags in SEO.
In short, H1 to H6 tags are referred to as heading tags. The word “head” in English means the top, and “tag” means to attach. Therefore, a heading tag is something that is attached to the top of any content.
Among heading tags, the most important is H1, also known as the main heading. H1 should be used only once throughout the entire content and must be placed at the beginning. After H1, the next important tags are H2, H3, H4, H5, and H6, which can be used one or multiple times. H2 to H6 tags are known as subheadings. To put it more clearly, all headings except H1 are considered subheadings.
Why are Heading Tags Used?
Heading tags are primarily used to inform search engine bots about the most important aspects of the content. The order of importance is as follows: H1, followed by H2, H3, H4, H5, and finally H6. Search engine bots read the content based on the H1 tag and look for the relevance of the rest of the content in relation to H1.
Let me give you an example: if you ask your student to write an essay on cows, and they start with the sentence “Essay on goats,” would you read the entire essay? Similarly, Google behaves the same way. If you send a request for indexing on a specific topic and it finds a different subject in the heading tag, it will leave without crawling.
How to Fix Heading Tags?
Heading tags should primarily be fixed during content strategy development. However, sometimes content writers may forget to use them. If a writer does not use heading tags, it’s okay; heading tags can be fixed during On-Page SEO. It is the responsibility of the SEO service provider to ensure that the heading tags are properly fixed from the beginning.
How Important is the H1 Tag for SEO?
The importance of the H1 tag can be understood with an example: Imagine you go to the market to buy a chicken. You find a chicken you like, but the problem is it has no head. Everything else is fine. Would you buy that chicken? Similarly, when a search engine bot crawls a page and sees everything is fine except for the head (H1), it will also leave without indexing that page.