I wanted to continue my series on onsite SEO factors today. If you haven’t been following the series you can check out the first four posts here:

The 15 Most Important Onsite SEO Factors: Part 1 – The Document Title

The 15 Most Important Onsite SEO Factors: Part 2 – Meta Tags

The 15 Most Important Onsite SEO Factors: Part 3 – Body Text

The 15 Most Important Onsite SEO Factors: Part 4 – URLs

Today’s theme focuses on headline text. The most popular headline text tags h1 and h2 and can be found in the html between

< h1 > important text < / h1>

or

< h2 > important text < / h2>

Putting words inside a h1or h2 makes the words appear much larger on the screen (h1 more so than h2).The way that the Google filters work is that if you are going to highlight some keywords over others and make them appear larger then they must be more important than the other words on the page.

A headline on top at the page is also generally descriptive of what is below therefore Google will consider your headline text to be of critical importance.

You should therefore a) always include h1 and h2 tags and b) be very strategic over what keywords you put inside the tags.

You should also limit the usage of the h1 and h2 tags on the page. If your entire text is inside a tag then you won’t get a SEO benefit. The point of the headline tags is to highlight important sections only. You could, for example, have a h1 tag at the top of the page to introduce your content and h2 tags below to introduce different sections of the content.

One factor to consider in doing all this, however, is the layout of the page. h1 and h2 tags make the text appear quite large and could interfere with the look and feel of the webpage.

Will you lose customers because the text is too big and doesn’t flow with the rest of the site? You can always hide headline tags through CSS to make them appear like normal-sized text but this is a questionable SEO practice that could earn you a Google penalty.