Content creation is a resource-intensive price to pay if you want to increase your organic search footprint and drive more traffic to your website. Given the huge investment many marketers make in creating top-notch content, it’s surprising that simple lapses in SEO best practices can often prevent valuable resources from ranking in search engine results pages (SERPs).

This article will look at how h1 and title tags help search engines understand your content and provide some practical tips for creating SEO-friendly h1 tags that will help you spot h1 errors and improve your rankings.

What is an H1 tag?

The H1 tag is an HTML tag that is one of the six heading tags that structure the content of a web page. Important pages on your website should have h1 tags for SEO benefits. H1 tags can guide the reader and give a clear indication of the content of the page.

HTML is an abbreviation for Hypertext Markup Language, which is the source code that tells web browsers how to display the content of a website.

The letter “h” stands for “heading,” and the number (1 through 6) indicates the position that each heading occupies in the information hierarchy of the page.

The H1 tag, as its name suggests, is usually the first heading tag on a page and is most often used to display the topic of the article or the title of a blog post.

For example, if you are creating a blog post from a draft like this:

How to Optimize Your Headings for Search

What is an H1 tag?

H1 Tags and Page Title Tags 
Why is the H1 Tag Important for SEO? 
Improving User Experience 
You can apply heading styles to visually represent the structure of your article to readers. Your content management system (CMS) then processes the HTML source code, where Google parses the content of your page.

H1 Tags and Page Title Tags 
H1 tags are often confused with page titles because the h1 tag is usually the title of a post. However, the HTML title tag serves a different purpose than the h1 tag. Therefore, each should be treated differently and optimized for its own specific purpose.

As I mentioned above, the h1 tag describes the topic of the content. Not only does it give Google an idea of ​​what the words on the page are about, but when displayed prominently at the top of the page, it immediately reassures searchers that they are in the right place when they come across your post.

The title tag also provides Google with information about the page's content, but it is not displayed visibly on the page. Instead, the page title is usually displayed as a clickable link in search results.

Usually?

I say “usually” because there is no guarantee that Google will download your title tag for use in search snippets. Google reserves the right to decide how title tags appear in search results to provide the best possible experience for its users.

Why H1 is an important tag for SEO

The art of search engine optimization requires balancing page optimization for search and people. The h1 tag is a perfect example of creating content that serves this dual purpose: improving on-page SEO while creating a better user experience.

Title tags help search engines crawl your content 
To quickly and efficiently return relevant results for search queries, Google extracts signals about the content of a post from the h1 and title tags. Search engines pay special attention to the content included in title tags (h1, h2, h3, etc.) to determine what a given page is about.

If you want to create search visibility for your content, use keywords in your titles, especially in your h1 tags. Keywords in your title tags show that your page is relevant to the specific queries you hope to rank for, and help you gain momentum in your digital marketing efforts.

H1 headings create a better user experience

Google is increasingly focusing on user experience (UX), so having a clear page structure with h1s is important to ensure that the right searchers find your article, find what they need within it, and stay to learn more.

The h1 tag improves the user experience by making it easy for visitors to see what your page is about at a glance. A quick glance at supporting headings like h2 and h3 can show the value of your content and reassure visitors that your blog post provides the information they are looking for.

In addition to making your page structure clear for the search index, using heading tags will provide reference points for users who will analyze your content and eventually scan your post to find the information they are looking for. You always want to make it easy for people to find answers to their questions. This means they will stay longer to learn more about you (or from you).

The trust that a clear page structure inspires increases your chances of generating more return traffic to your website and building a loyal audience that you can convert into customers.

Optimized H1 pages help win content snippets

A snippet is a snippet of a web page that appears at the top of Google search results to quickly answer a user’s question. Google automatically extracts the content of a snippet from the content of a page that ranks on the first page of the SERP.

Optimizing your page for a snippet before publishing it will increase your chances of winning the snippet when it makes it into the top 10.

One way to increase your chances of getting a snippet is to optimize your h1 with relevant keywords. In this example, the h1 contains the keywords “best audiobooks” and “travel.”