Happy new year, friends! It’s been a minute, and it’s time for more of what you’re here for: SEO help (or greater understanding). Just a reminder my name is Zane and I am an absolute beginner when it comes to learning and understanding technical SEO, and I am chronicling my journey through it for you: other beginners.

What is an “H1” Tag?

So, at a first glance, H1 tags seems like something you’ve never seen before or heard, but you have. If you’ve used Google docs or even wordpress, you’ve been given the option to use “H’s”!

It refers to “headings” and is a bit of HTML that allows you to visually organize information throughout a document by using a series of differently formatted (usually smaller) headings. For instance, the title of this current blog post “A beginner’s Guide Through SEO: H1 Tags” is in fact, my H1.

Of course the fist subheading of this will be H2. If there were more information to offer within this heading, that would be divided using H3, and so on.

Why Is This Important?

H1 Tags are important for no shortage of reasons!

1. User Experience
Everything will always boil down to the user experience. The better the experience a user has or the easier time a user has understanding content, the more likely that user will go back to your content for other things or recommend it to others. This naturally increases your traffic and definitely qualifies under SEO.

2. Tells Google About Your Content.
Google needs to know what your content is about if it’s going to rank for somebody’s search. An H1 tag used to be quite the identifier or key marker for Google, but Google is always learning and growing. With that, it no longer needs the H1 tag to discern this information, but it definitely doesn’t skip past it.

3. Improves Accessibility
Better dividing up your information also benefits other technologies used by the seeing impaired. Those using screen readers will have a better and easier time understanding content when they know precisely what it is about. It makes for an easier user experience for those who need different accommodations.

Best Practices

Firstly, every page should have `1. Only 1. And it should be unique to that page alone. Having more than one can seriously sabotage your ranking efforts and greatly confuses Google what your page is about. It also makes sure your readers are aware of the hierarchal organization of your information.

Now, while I may be a beginner to SEO on the more technical side, I do know a thing or two about writing and what might captivate an audience. What makes for a good H1 from an SEO perspective, is truly what just makes a good title in general. Ideally, you want them to be fun and interesting, while also being short and concise (no more than 60 or 70 characters), but still descriptive of what information exists on the page. It’s a bit of a holy grail, honestly. You may not always get it right, but always aim for it.

You might also want to include the major keyword you’re hoping to rank for in there, and to help prevent inconsistencies, make sure your title tag and H1 tag are the very similar, as H1 tags usually don’t appear in your SERPS (search engine results page).

How to Audit H1 Tags

To do this, we go back to our friend Screaming Frog. If you are in need of a tool to help you understand a website, this is certainly the one.

A screenshot of an SEO crawling tool called Screaming Frog. Specifically highlighting the H1 tag feature.
A screenshot of Screaming Frog SEO Tool

So for everybody’s privacy, we aren’t going to crawl a website, but you can literally crawl any website you choose should you download the tool. But When you crawl a website, you can scroll down halfway on the right hand side in the overview until you reach H1. Here it will let you know all the pages that are missing H1 tags, or have duplicate, or aren’t really meeting some of your best practices.

On the right hand side under “Address” it will go through all the webpages associated with the crawled site that meet any of the paramters chosen, and if you were to choose a specific page, it will go through even further detail below. From there you can export that information into a .CSV, and make sure a client knows exactly what the issues may be and where they are on the backend.

It’s honestly a pretty intuitive and remarkable tool used by an abundant of SEO experts. It’s pretty irreplaceable.

Conclusion

H1 tags are a pretty easy thing to keep track of depending on what you’re using to publish your site and content. If your site already exists, you have the help of Screaming Frog which can help guide some of the changes you may need to make or suggest aclient make. The big thing is don’t be afraid to jump in and get your hands dirty when it comes to this stuff. I was really nervous upfront, but I asked Reddit what I should be looking for and possibily auditing and it was pretty insightful. Just make sure you’re asking the right questions in the right places.

And as per always, if you have questions, concerns, theories, or just want to say you found this helpful or how you think I could offer more, PLEASE let me know! I’d really appreciate the feedback.