What is an H1 Tag?

The H1 (for heading 1 or H1 tag) is the main title of a web page. There are 6 possible levels of H: from H1 to H6. These different levels of titles are used to structure a page and to indicate to search engine robots what the titles and subtitles are.

The H1, or level 1 title, is a fundamental element for the referencing of a page. It is a criterion called "on page", that is to say on the page and which does not depend on an external environment, such as incoming links for example.

If you are not yet familiar with this concept, we will explain its role and how to properly write your different H1s on your site. What is an H1 tag?

Role of H1 on a web page?

When the search engine robot crawls a page, it cannot know what the hierarchy is, that is, the layout of the page. Conversely, a human can directly identify the elements put in color, the variations of the font sizes used to highlight titles.

It is therefore the role of the hn tags to indicate to the engines what is the main title (the h1) and what are the possible subtitles and sub-parts (from h2 to h6). It is by this indication (which is therefore found in the source code of the page) that the robot can differentiate the titles and the paragraphs.

Importance of H1 for Google SEO?

Google will then know what the main title of the page is. It can thus define the main subject of the page and know what the general theme of this page is.

The words present in the h1 tag are therefore a sign for Google of the subject of the page. It gives a strong weight to these words in its relevance algorithm.

Writing and optimizing the H1 tag, the rules to follow for SEO

To write your H1 tags, you can use your site management tool: your CMS (WordPress, Joomla, Magento, etc.). If you don't know how to do this step, your webmaster will know how to assign an H1 attribute to your page titles.

Here are the main rules to follow to optimize your titles:

• Have only one H1 tag per page (the logic remains the same: identify the main subject of a page).
• Write different H1s for each page.
• Use lower levels (h2 to h6) to structure the speech.
• Insert the main keyword of the page in the H1.
• Although there is no rule on the size limit of title 1, we recommend not to exceed approximately 70 characters (or 5 to 8 words).
• Use words that are descriptive of the content of the page (not a series of keywords). The test is simple: just by reading the H1, anyone should be able to understand what the page is about. If this is not the case, it is probably because your H1 is not sufficiently descriptive and explicit.