H1 vs H2: Search engine rankings
May 21st, 2008Here’s a quickie: Is placing keywords in HTML heading tags (h1, h2, h3, etc.) a good idea for search engine optimization? Specifically, do search engines give higher precedence to pages with keywords in h1 tags vs. lower tags like h2?
If you’re optimizing for Google rankings, you’ll definitely want to put your most important keywords between h1 tags since our h1 keyword page was indexed sooner and listed higher than our h2 keyword page. But just like our previous tests have shown, Yahoo! has a different idea about search engine ranking placing the h2 page above the h1 page in search results. Go figure.
On most of my own pages I tend to place the same text in my title tags as in my first h1 on the page, mainly for convenience sake but it really makes sense from an optimization standpoint as well. Your page title should contain the most important, most descriptive keywords and repeating them in an important location on the page itself is good business. If you’re optimizing for Google, reserve your h1 tags for the most important keywords on the page and watch your listings fly to the top!
