Author: Digital Tailors:

Table of contents:

• What exactly is a header tag?
• Why the H1 tag is considered the most important on-page SEO element
• Use header tags to also split up the text to offer a better user experience
• Why you shouldn’t keyword-stuff the header tags
• How to best use your header tags to improve your on-page SEO

Header tags are one of those elements of search engine optimisation that sometimes get overlooked.

However, the importance of header tags shouldn’t be ignored. As a matter of fact, header tags can be used to better structure your business’s content marketing.

Therefore, if you’re writing about a subject, let’s say to do with offering legal advice, you can use header tags to add structure to the page. This then should make it crystal clear to Googlebot, plus the reader, what the page is actually about.

Therefore, the titles, as you progress from H1 down to H6, should all indicate what that section of text is about. This then allows a very good idea of what information the page is offering.

Tell me more. What exactly is a header tag?

A header tag is simply HTML code that is used to mark up the main headings on a page. It really is as simple as that, and the best part is, if you have a WordPress site, or another good CMS, with a few clicks of the in-built editor options, you can mark-up those different header tags on the page.

Therefore, no HTML or coding experience is often needed.

Yet, the benefits are clear.

A good set of header tags, ranging from H1-H6, simply allows Googlebot to gain an understanding of what the page is about. Then, from there, Google can use its semantic web knowledge, gained from Google Knowledge Graph, to gain a good understanding of what the page is about.

For example.

If header tag 1 was H1 (Pin-striped suits)
H2 was (light grey suits)
H3 was (Hugo Boss suits)
Its pretty clear to both the reader and Googlebot that the page is discussing suits and formal workwear.

But what’s the purpose of the H2 tag?

It’s important to acknowledge that the H1-H6 tags are ranked according to how important the page titles are. Think of the H1 header tag as the main purpose of why you are writing that work, then as you move down to H6, the other header tags are the related questions.

Just as you would answer a shopper’s questions, addressing perhaps the most important question first. Then there’s normally a set of follow-up or additional queries, these are your H2-H6 tags.

Therefore, the H1 tags offer the most important text.

Helping Googlebot to understand the page

What header tags can do is to help Google to understand the page and the information it is about. This can therefore help improve the business’s search engine optimisation.

Why you should only use one H1 tag per page

It’s important to bear in mind that the header tags are ordered in terms of importance. Therefore, choose how you write the H1 tag carefully. Don’t keyword stuff, but also don’t write multiple H1 tags; there should only be one.

Logical structure

A lot of us today are impatient.

You have to keep this in mind when writing content marketing for your business. That is, you may write a 4,000-word article, and it may rank very high on Google.

But the average reader often they are not going to read the whole post.

Therefore, use the header tags as a way of splitting up the text, as well as helping the reader to skip to the section they want to read.

You may think that helping a shopper to skip to the relevant section, and perhaps ignore the rest of the article, could actually decrease the dwell time.

However, what it might actually do is greatly decrease the bounce rate.

Therefore, instead of potentially thousands of shoppers getting to the page, being greeted with a huge amount of text, and thinking to themselves, “I am not reading all of that”,- well, instead, they can skip to the section that they are interested in reading.

This, therefore, helps to decrease the bounce rate.

Add relevant keywords, but don’t keyword stuff the text

A common mistake in SEO is for a business to read that the header tag is the most important part of on-page SEO, and this is true.
But then the business can make the mistake of “keyword stuffing”, for example, if they are selling, let’s say, a certain brand of shoe, they may keyword stuff that title with the brand of shoe.

This causes keyword stuffing issues, which can trigger a Google penalty.

Therefore, our best advice, at this agency, is rather simple: just write your header tags as if you were talking to a customer. Write them naturally, write the keywords as if you are talking to a customer, write in front of you.

 

Google EEAT

A really crucial part of getting that page or blog post to rank on page 1 of Google is all about improving the Google EEAT score for that page.

This means in the text, demonstrating that the work shows real experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness.

Therefore, you can use the page titles (H1-H6) to show that you have answered the question in a comprehensive way.

That is when Googlebot “crawls and indexes the work”, it will be clear as crystal that you have offered a comprehensive answer to the question.

The best SEO consultants in the entire world will tell you, that the pages which rank say number position, they offer a lot of information.

These pages therefore normally have a very high word count.

 

Google Helpful Content Update

Its also important to remember a very important Google update.

That’s the Google Helpful Content Update.
Therefore, you could make the page more helpful, by for example using the H1-H6 titles as questions that your customers ask around that topic.

For example, have a main question, such as “which is the most energy efficient washing machine of 2026”. Yet then the other subheading could be follow up questions, such as which is the best energy efficient washing machine below £700.00.

How our agency can help

We are one of the best SEO agencies in the whole Bristol.

How can we make such a bold statement?

Well, quite simply because we have SEO consultants who are you are simply the bee’s knees, they have over 10 years of experience.

Therefore, whether your website needs help with the technical, on-page or off-page SEO, we are the experts to call.

Monthly packages start from £1000.00 for local SEO; we also work with businesses based throughout the whole of the United Kingdom as well.