How important are H1 tags?

Is it important to have header tags?

[gabby]

I just ran a spider simulator on my site. One of the recommendations it came back with was to add H1 tags. I never considered this an issue? Opinions?

How do you insert H1 tags using Front Page?

[Anolonda]

Hello Gabby,

Yes, H1 tags are important, how important depends on how you use the tag and which search engine you're talking about.

Back in the days of yore... H1 tags were used as a page header designation. If your page was about "purple widgets' You would place <H1>Purple Widgets</H1> at the top of you page. When seen through a browser, the encapsulated text appeared much larger that the rest of the pages text and helped people to understand what that page of information was about.

There are differing opinions about the importance of still using the tag today, but I still use it in my sites and it does seem to help. Using them won't catapult you to the top of the search engines but if used correctly at the top of the page, it can help certain search engines to understand what your page is about. It is usually a good practice to make sure the words in your H1 tag also appear several times on the page, in your METAs, and somewhere in the Title.

In Frontpage, you may want to hand edit your code. Frontpage uses Font size formatting instead of h1 tags. Look at your page in HTML and change this:

<font size="5">Purple Widgets</font>

To this:

<H1>Purple Widgets<H1>

That should do the trick for what you need. Obviously, you don't want a whole page of H1 tags on your page so use it in small doses.

Have Fun!~

[cmatcme]

Header tags are very useful and customizable with casading style sheets. I use them all the time on my site. It's a handy shortcut and time-saver if you use them.

<h1 style = "{background-color: #6666FF}" color="#000099" align="center">

can become...

<h1>

and the same with h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, p, table, input...

You can use the same css document on all your pages.

One little document can save you all that time!

[jetnovo]

I've heard that <h1> through <h6> are good for search engines, good for use with CSS, and almost essential for people using screen readers (or other diability accessibility software to browse your site).
I stongly recommend using them at all times - although I can't remember the specifics of all of the above, I know that using them hasn't caused me any problems but I suspect it has greatly helped in the above areas.

[ogletree]

H2 tags play a big role as well. The page should have a bigger h1 tag that describes the page. You can make it more resonable with css. You can have H2 tags descibe subheadings. This cna also be made to look nicer with css.

Of course having an Hx tag does not do you any good if you don't have your keywords in there. Don't stuff them. Try to reword the title and hx tags so the read differently but have the same keywords in them. Order does not matter much for Google but Yahoo likes things in order. So if you have keyword1 keyword2 you can rank for keyword1 keyword2 on Yahoo but not keyword2 keyword1.

[mbush27]

Try and think of things naturally here:

When you open up a newspaper, what catches your eye? The headings of each article.

Treat your H1 tag the same. You want both the search engine and the user to see exactly what each page is about (especially a page you want to rank well).

Use H2 tags as secondary headings as well, but do not have more than one H1 tag.

Don't forget about the title tag as well!

Matt

[Matt Probert]

I just ran a spider simulator on my site. One of the recommendations it came back with was to add H1 tags. I never considered this an issue? Opinions?

As has already been said. Use <h1> tags for page headings, and <h2> for section headings. It certainly assists Google in understanding the essence of the page.

Matt