Are <H1> Tags Needed on All Pages of a Website?

[cdblaine]

Hello.

I used an SEO product to do a "site audit" of my small business website, which is suffering from
very low traffic. The results identified a number of pages that were missing <H1> tags.
These pages are not landing pages. They include an "About Us" page, an "FAQ" page,
and similar lower profile pages.

The headings on these pages typically don't include the keywords I would try to optimize for on other pages.
The headings are generally of the form "<H2>About Us</H2>", "<H2>Frequently Asked Questions</H2>", etc.

Is it important for every page - even non-landing pages - to have <H1> tags?

Thank you.

[Wilburforce]

Without any question at all is it good practice to use H1. It doesn't make semantic sense to use H2 in a document with no H1.

Forget Search Engines and think about users (including those with screen-readers). Using consistent layout, format and semantics throught your site will make your site more user-friendly.

Not using H1 on some pages will make no positive difference at all to the pages that do have it, and all pages are potential landing pages. If there are pages you don't want visitors to find, don't publish them.

[JesterMagic]

Because of a template until this past year one of our main websites had an H1 tag that was used by the logo in the header and contained the site name for all pages. All the main headings of the page where H2.

This was finally fixed and we removed the H1 tag in the header and made all the main headings H1. As far as we could tell this did not make any difference in the serps. This didn't really surprise us (we had talked about the change on this forum before hand) but as Wilburforce says above we did it because it makes good practice. (and with the hope it might make some difference)

Every page should have an H1 tag heading even ones you consider non landing pages. By making this change will your site rank higher? Probably not.

One related thing I did notice which boosted are rankings a bit on a number of our pages was to make sure the main heading of the page in the h1 tags was different from the page title found in the head (the one between the title tags). In most cases our pages title (except it also has the site name attached to the end) reflected the heading in the h1 tag.

So for example the page title was:

Red Widgets are Fun - Site Name

and the h1 tag heading was:

Red Widgets are Fun

Changing the page title to (while leaving the h1 tag heading the same):

Fun with Widgets that are Red - Site Name

resulted in a 2 to 4 position boost for some reason. Not sure why as I think the page title should be the same but it did.

[tangor]

Because of past abuses of h1 nearly all search engines reduced the importance of h1 (or any h tags).

Commonsense semantics in recent years suggests every page should have an h1. Personally I think of h1 as the page title.

[cdblaine]

Thank you all for your comments. They are extremely helpful.

BTW, I wish I could vote for each of the three comments. But there is no button that allows me to. Above each message I see a button with a message #. If I click the down arrow
next to the message number it shows "Report This Message". Nothing about voting. Perhaps I haven't established a reputation and don't have the right to cast a vote. I'm a bit confused.

[not2easy]

@cdblaine - Sorry, I don't know what turns on the voting button. I do know it is automated and it should become available to you shortly. One day you'll see the 'Like' next to the 'Votes:' count.

[lucy24]

next to the message number it shows "Report This Message". Nothing about voting.

Heh, that's funny. At some time in the past, it was message-reporting that only got enabled after you'd been around for a while. It seems they changed it when I wasn't looking.

[tangor]

One final though on h tags...

Webmasters---some, not all!---new to the web continue to make the rookie mistake of using h tags for formatting purposes. This is semantically incorrect. The "ease" of styling is a lure in that regard, however HEADERS are just that, not font decorations.

Each page deserves an h1 ... it is the page title. Any significant break in content deserves a separate header ... and the way to know when to do that is to know and understand OUTLINING a document. Also know when SECTIONING is useful (as each SECTION can have it's own H1, for example) and when to use ASIDE.

HTML is a markup language for DOCUMENTS, and all documents have a structure. Example below is egregiously absurd, but indicates what h tags are for:

h1 Widgets
---blah blah blah
---h2 History of Widgets
------blah blah blah
------h3 Pre web
---------blah blah blah
------h3 Post web
---------blah blah blah
---h2 Future Widets
------blah blah blah
---h2 Building Widgets in Your Backyard
------blah blah blah
------h3 Cautions with home-grown widets
---------h4 Environmental
---------h4 Taxes
---------h4 Dangers
------------h5 Local Hazmat Numbers

All pages need an h1 (generally ignored these days by the SEs)
SOME pages benefit from h2 (think sections related to h1!). Darn few need h3 or above simply because the user won't hang around that long to read that much content. CODE FOR THE AUDIENCE and most times all will work out fine.

[Pjman]

Maybe I'm weird, but I have always matched my H1 and Title tags. This month, over all sites, I have 652,000,000 page views. So, not sure that is the reason, but I'm doing something right.

[cdblaine]

Thank you for the "Welcome" and for your comments.

Responding to "tangor" re voting - I do have js enabled for my browser, and always have. Can js be enabled/disabled for the "webmasterworld" site?

"not2easy" mentioned that voting may be automatically enabled soon. I'm a new member and perhaps a delay is normal.

Thanks.