On a blog post or long-form article, your post title is generally the best choice for your H1 tag. In this example blog post from The New York Times, the blog post title serves as an eye-catching header for the page.
H1 Tag SEO Best Practices
H1 tags are a design element with impact! A great example of a shared area of interest between SEOs, content creators, and website designers. As a key part of on-page optimization and the primary focal point for a user when they land on your page, your H1 has the power to keep users on your site for longer.
Should you include your target keyword? Of course! You’d need to make a good case to exclude it, even if it’s just a signal to a visitor that they are in the right place. In some cases it’s been identified that H1s have been used instead of meta titles in the search results.
Many web designers or website owners who are new to search engine optimization will use HTML headers only as a design element, without consideration for the SEO impact of their use. H1s should be used as a way to optimize your page for your target keyword, not simply as a styling choice.
It may also be the case that many SEOs will say that the main heading should always be an H1, and subsequent headings H2, and H3, and so on. While this is still considered best practice, as far as Google is concerned, they are perfectly capable of understanding your content regardless of the heading tags. As Tom Capper explains “The main heading, whatever tag it may have is still important, and best practice is for it to be an H1, with a good heading hierarchy beneath. Using good, clean HTML can help web crawling/parsing technologies that may be less robust than Google's - such as screen readers, or smaller search engines.”
Can a page have multiple H1 tags?
Yes, anything is possible! However, generally speaking, your content should have a single H1 at the top of the page. In some circ*mstances, where a page truly covers multiple high-level topics, multiple H1s can be used. Google’s John Muller has stated that it will not penalize pages with multiple H1 tags. However, we recommend sticking to one H1 tag per page in order to keep your content topically focused, to prevent confusion for users of all abilities and issues with keyword cannibalization on your site more generally.
H1 tag length
There is no technical limit to the character count of an H1 tag, though we recommend keeping it under 60 characters to ensure that your headline is easily readable. This also allows you to use the same text in both your H1 and meta title, if you decide to follow this route.
Every page on your site needs an H1 tag
H1 tags should be a required feature on all of your site’s pages. Even if the page is not a content article with a clearly defined headline, you should still come up with a keyword-optimized H1 that clearly indicates to search engines and users what the page is about.
H1 Tags vs Title Tags
Title tags are another important HTML element. Like H1 tags, title tags indicate what your page is about to both users and search engines. However, there are some key differences between H1 tags and title tags.
Title tags appear in search engine results pages (SERPs), meaning they are the title of the page that users will see before clicking to your site. They also appear in browser tabs. HTML title tags are not visible anywhere on the content of a page. H1 tags, by comparison, are prominently visible to users on a webpage.
The key difference is that title tags are primarily visible in the SERPs, while H1 tags are visible on your page. It is important to incorporate your primary target keyword for a page into both the title tag and H1.
This is where the job of Content Marketers and SEOs intersect, as Tom Capper says “A heading will entice a user that has clicked through from the SERP to keep reading - it needs to coexist well with what they saw in the meta title displayed in SERPs, and be compelling in itself.”
Can your title tag and H1 tag be the same?
In some instances, title tags and H1 tags can (and should) contain the same text. In the Nordstrom example shown above, “Women’s Shoes” is both the meta title and H1 of the page.
In the New York Times example, the page’s H1 and meta title are different. The meta title is “The Best Hiking Boots of 2023 | Reviews By Wirecutter”. In some instances, you may want to include a few Click-Through-Rate improving features in your title, that you don’t necessarily want visible on your page. In this case, those features are brand name, the word “best” and the year the article was published.
Analyze your site’s H1 tags with an SEO Audit
It is important to make sure that every page on your site has a single, keyword-optimized H1 tag. The easiest way to perform this analysis is by running an SEO audit, leveraging a tool like Moz’s On-Demand Crawl. Moz will identify all pages on your site that have missing or invalid H1 tags. You can export these results to a CSV or view them in-app. This is the simplest and quickest way to highlight all pages on your site that have issues with their H1 tags.
