H tags, or heading tags, are one of the many things we can do on a website to help Google better understand it — but there’s a code-level meaning we need to cover first.

H tags in the HTML code

Before telling you what these tags mean for SEO, I want to give you an intro example:

You’ve probably seen tags like

or

on plenty of websites, specifically in their HTML code. These tags are used to organize a website’s content into a hierarchy. Here’s an example:

If I go to a URL on my site where I explain What is the meta title tag and what is it for?, we can see the following in its HTML code:

What is the meta title tag and what is it for?

If you notice, the H1 of this URL contains the keywords I’d like to rank for, and with this H1 I’m essentially telling Google something like: “Hey, this is the main topic of my article, I need you to give it all the weight.”

Remember: the H1 should contain the article’s main topic.

Now, to keep going with the example, let me show you what the H2 would look like

How do we change the meta title of a URL?

While the main topic is “What is the meta title?”, I also want to touch on subtopics like “How do we change the meta title on a URL?” As you can see, everything is organized hierarchically — inside this H1 there’s this H2, and there’s probably an H3 nested inside that H2 too.

Modes of transportation

<h2> Vehicles

          <h3>Manual

              <h3>Automatic

                 <h4>Nissan

Quick Dose

H tags generally go up to number 6, meaning

,

,

,

,

, and

. In SEO, we typically use H1, H2, and H3 to place the keywords we care about, since the further a tag is from the H1, the less weight it carries within that hierarchical structure.

You should always try to keep things logical when it comes to organizing your content hierarchy — don’t talk about dogs in your H1 and then cats in your H2, since, as you can imagine, that makes NO sense. Instead, talk about dogs in your H1 and, for example, a specific dog breed in your H2.