Computer and website code can be confusing to talk about. Here at inConcert Web Solutions, if you have any questions, we’ve got answers and we’ll break it down for you to make sure you understand exactly what we mean. Recently, we heard from one of our website clients on our Search Engine Marketing plan. He had some questions about the code that makes up his website, and whether we might make some changes that could improve SEO on his site.
Question: I’ve been told that each pages should include only one instance of a header tag (<h1>) so that search engines won’t get confused. Is this true? If so, is my site using this code?
Answer: H1 Tags are part of the “behind the scenes” content that can highlight what the page is about, just like the title tag of a page. The content in a header tag is usually the same as the page title, and adding header tags will further clarify the topic of the page to both people and search engines. It wouldn’t hurt to use an <h1> tag on your webpages, but the effect will be minimal. By default, we do not add the header tags, due to the negligible effect.
Of course, if you would like to start using header tags, we can absolutely help you with that. One study I found did say H1 tags still provide a piece of benefit to SEO, but the content is just as (if not more) important. This study said “Whilst this experiment was far from perfect it does seem to indicate that there is some benefit to using H1 tags for SEO. However this may be in small measure.”
So, keeping that in mind, you would be better off expending your energy on developing some awesome content than tinkering around with header tag code.