After a search engine bot scans the meta data of your web page, it will move on to the body of the page. The body of your page should have a flow to it, and it should include header tags. This will organize your content for your users and also for the search engine bots.

What are these header tags?

The heading tags <h1>, <h2>, <h3>, and <h4>. It is important that you have an h1 on every page, but the rest aren’t really required. Obviously, having more header tags won’t hurt you (as long as they are relevant). Although this won’t have much influence on your search engine ranking, it will help. It should be done in conjunction with more effective SEO techniques to create a perfectly optimized page.

Where should I put the header tags?

The headings should show the order of the page. Someone should be able to view only the headings and understand what the overall page is about. Some suggest that the h1 is used for the site title, but I suggest that it is used for the main header of the page. For example, the h1 on a post on this blog would be the title of the post, not the title of the website. Use W3C’s Semantic Extractor to view only the headers of your web page. You should be able to follow what is happening in the website. Note that if your website is not valid, you might have trouble using the semantic extractor.

Still confused?

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