TIP 5I can’t find any definitive proof online that says you need to use Heading Tags (H1, H2, H3, H4, H5, H6) or that they improve rankings in Google, and I have seen pages do well in Google without them - but I do use them, especially the H1 tag on the page. For me it’s another piece of a perfect page, in the traditional sense, and I try to build a site for Google and humans.

<h1>The Hobo SEO Company, Scotland</h1>

I still generally only use one <h1> heading tag in my keyword targeted pages - I believe this is the way the W3C intended it be used - and ensure they appear at the top of a page and written with my main keywords or keyword phrases incorporated. I have never experienced any problems using CSS to control the appearance of the heading tags making them larger or smaller.

I use as many H2 - H6 as is necessary depending on the size of the page, but generally I use H1, H2 & H3. You can see here how to use header tags properly.

How many words in the H1 Tag? As many as I think is sensible - as short and snappy as possible usually. Aaron Wall at SEOBook recommends not making your h1 tags the exact same as your page titles, although I personally have never seen a problem with this on a quality site.

As always be sure to make your heading tags highly relevant to the content on that page and not too spammy, either.

Part of our July on-site / on page seo tutorial :)

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