What’s an H1 tag and why should I care?

I haven’t gotten this nerdy in a while, so buckle up.

No matter if you have a website that was coded from scratch – or created on a builder like SquareSpace, all sites are built with roughly the same building blocks.

Your computer reads these blocks of code and display the shapes, colors, text, and images as it’s told.

Coded text is often surrounded by invisible Heading Tags within the HTML code. These are just little organizational “pins” that label the importance of content on the page.

It’s like highlighting the page titles in a textbook.

Heading tags go from 1 (important) to 6 (not important, rarely used) and should be organized in order of importance.

If your website is well-built, you will have ordered, cascading tags show up throughout your code. It should look like an outline for a middle-school paper.

Here’s an example for a school’s hypothetical About page:

• <h1> About Our School</h1>
  • <h2> Our History</h2>
  • <h2> Our Staff</h2>
    • <h3> Principal Smith</h3>
    • <h3> Pastor John</h3>
  • <h2> Our Curriculum</h2>
    • <h3> Early Childhood</h3>
    • <h3> Elementary School</h3>
    • <h3> Middle School</h3>
    • <h3> High School</h3>
      • <h4> College Credit Program</h4>
  • <h2> Our Facilities</h2>

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Most of the time, instead of this well-organized structure, I see some “tag soup.” It could look like:

• <h1> Pastor John</h1>
• <h1> Elementary School</h1>
• <h1> About Our School</h1>
  • <h2> Our History</h2>
  • <h2> Our Staff</h2>
    • <h3> Principal Smith</h3>
    • <h3> Early Childhood</h3>
  • <h2> College Credit Program</h2>
  • <h2> Our Curriculum</h2>
    • <h3> Middle School</h3>
    • <h3> High School</h3>
      • <h4> Our Facilities</h4>

…or some other chaotic combination… orrrr no tags at all… 😨

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Google needs your tags to be organized to know 1) what the page is about and 2) what the site is about. End game? Your content gets shown to folks who are searching for exactly what you have to offer.

So – enough of the nerd stuff. How do you know if your tags are well-organized?

One way to do this is by learning HTML.

The best way to do this is by downloading this free Chrome extension. Then, go to your site, click on the extension, go to the Headings tab, and see what’s going on within the code.

Watch me explain how to use the tool

An even easier way to do it? Email me and let me investigate for you. I’ll send you a video screengrab of what I notice.