H1, H2, and H3 tags play a crucial role in SEO (Search Engine Optimization). These are HTML tags used to identify headings and subheadings within your content from other types of text (e.g., paragraph text). They indirectly influence your website’s ranking in search engines, as they make your content easier for visitors to read and for search engine bots to understand.
The H1 tag is typically reserved for the page’s main title or heading and is deemed the most important. It often matches the title that appears in the SEO title tag of the page. The H1 tag serves as a direction for your readers about what they will read on your page. As such, it should contain the primary keywords you want your page to rank for. According to Moz, a leading SEO tool, including your targeted keywords in the H1 tag can help with your ranking efforts.
Following H1 tags are H2 and H3 tags, serving as subheadings. The H2 tag generally indicates the main points of your page, while H3 used for points beneath these H2 subheadings. They create a hierarchy that structures your content in an organized and readable manner. Brian Dean from Backlinko highlights that these tags guide visitors and search engine bots to the main topics of your content.
Additionally, Google’s algorithms have evolved to prioritize user experience, and page readability is now a crucial ranking factor. Readable content is well-organized, divided into sections with descriptive headers, including H1, H2, and H3 tags. Precisely why the Google SEO Starter Guide recommends using these header tags to present the structure of your content.
Examples of how you’d use these tags might be:
- An H1 tag for the title of your blog post, “A Beginner’s Guide to SEO”.
- H2 tags for the main sections of the post, such as “What is SEO?”, “How Search Engines Work”, and “SEO Best Practices”.
- H3 tags for sub-sections within the main sections, like under “SEO Best Practices” you might have H3s like “Keyword Research”, “On-page SEO”, and “Link Building”.
The sources used in constructing this response include the SEO Learning Center by Moz (https://moz.com/learn/seo), Google’s SEO Starter Guide (https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/7451184?hl=en), and Backlinko, an SEO training company (https://backlinko.com/hub/seo/heading-tags). With their help, we understand that although H1, H2, and H3 tags may not contribute directly to SEO, they play a vital role in usability and user experience, which indirectly helps boost SEO rankings.
