On-Page SEO Tips: H1 Keyword Ranking Tricks (Search Engine Optimization Marketing)

Hey everyone, it's Steven with SEO Chatter, and today we're going to talk about a blog post I wrote called

SEO H1 Tags Best Practices, How to Optimize H1 for Higher Rankings

And I want to talk about this topic because the H1 tag is one of the most important HTML elements on your webpage

that you can use to boost your rankings in the search engines

So if you've never thought about the H1 tag in this way or you're just looking for some tips on how to do it better

this video is going to give you all the answers you need. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to go through five tips that you should use

every time you write your H1 tags for any web page on your site so that you can get the ranking power from SEO using that HTML element

Now I'm going to go through all these things, and I'm also going to leave a link in the description below to this blog post

in case you want to read more and see some of the examples that I talk about going on here

But you will walk away from this video with the top five tips that you can use. use to maximize the SEO power of your H1 tags. So let's get into it. Now the first thing I want to

talk about is what is the H1 tag in case you don't know what that is. Well the H1 tag is essentially

the first heading on a web page. And so when you go to a web page, it should be the first thing

you see underneath of like the navigation menu. And the purpose of this H1 tag is to define the

main topic for the page. And the correct hierarchical heading layout will have the H1 tag is the

first piece of information on the page that defines the topic for the page, and then you have an

H2 tag under that, and you can have as many as you want, and then H2s, H3s, et cetera, et cetera

as those are subsections of each other. So the H1 tag used in HTML is to define that main topic

for the page and to start the structure for the page for the content. Now let's move on to the tips

So SEO H1 Tags best practices. The first thing you want to do is you always want to include your keywords for the page

in that H1 tag, and you want to have your main keyword you're targeting for the page

in that H1 at a bare minimum. You can add secondary keywords if you can, if it makes sense, but you always want the

main keyword in that field. And you also want to make sure that that keyword is at the very beginning of that H1 tag

Because the closer it is to the beginning, the more SEO ranking power it will be. given. Now, if you look at this blog post, my H1 tag is SEO H1 Tags Best Practices. And that's the main

keyword that I'm trying to target. I also add some other words, how to optimize H1 for higher rankings

And so I'm just using that to add some secondary keywords I'm trying to rank this page for. But you'll see that the very first keyword is that phrase, SEO H1 Tags Best Practices

Now with that said, I also want this page to rank for a couple of variations of that keyword

So I also wanted to rank for H1 SEO best practices and H1 best practices

So those are three variations on the same thing. But I not just going to keep repeating those keyword phrases in the H1 just to get exact matches because that would just be too much So instead if you look at the H1 for this page I got all three of those versions in this H1 using the words that I used for the H1

And so SEO H1 Tags Best Practices covers H1 best practices, H1 best practices, H1SEO best practices

and SEO H1 tags best practices. It covers them all. So that's what you want to do in your H1 is you just want to make sure that you're covering all of those

keywords that are related in the phrase inside that H1 without just duplicating them over and over

and over again. Now, the second tip is you want to meet your user intent with the H1, and this is important

because if there's a mismatch between your meta title, which is also the title tag

in H1, you can cause people to bounce from your page. A good example of this is, I explained in the blog post, suppose you were searching on Google

for this keyword phrase. how many keywords per page? And then the very first result that you see, the title tag says

how many keywords per page a detailed guide? So you're going to click on that because you're thinking, oh, wow, this is exactly what I'm looking for

how many keywords per page, and this is going to be a detailed guide on what the answer is

But then you click on that result, and the very first thing you see on the page is the H1 tag

and the H1 tag says, how many keywords should you be tracking per page

Now, that doesn't meet your search intent, does it? No, that's talking about tracking keywords and an SEO tool

It's not about how many keywords you use per page. Now, imagine you go back to the search results, and then you see my site, and then you click on it

And then my H1 tag says this. How many keywords per page for SEO should you focus on

Now, that's a clear match of search intent. You're trying to find out how many keywords per page

you should put on the page and my H1 gives you exactly that

So that's what's important here because if there's a disconnect between the H1 tag

and the meta title tag then you can lose your visitors and you don't want that

And so when you're writing your H1s in order to meet that user intent you want to just ask yourself

two simple questions like I get here from search metrics which is what does a user want

when they open my article and what's their intent? Just think about those two things, and that's going to help you write your H1 tag very simply

because you want to make sure that the person's getting what they think they're getting when they click on the SER

Tip number three, you want to keep your H1 between 20 to 70 characters

Now, this is just basic information that people in the industry know

I don't need to go too much into why and how and all that, but people have done different studies, et cetera

and if you do 20 to 70 characters, you're going to be safe for your H1

And what this means is you don't want your H1 to just be one word, and you don't want it to be 30 words

You just want it to be within 20 to 70 characters, so it's something natural

That way, it's not too short and it's not too long. Because really, you can tag anything on the pages in H1

You can make a whole sentence in H1 if you want to, but that just not the best SEO H1 tag best practice So just keep it simple here make it natural 20 to 70 characters Now the fourth tip is you only want to use one H1 tag per page And I mentioned this because

this actually came up once. Somebody asked John Mueller from Google, hey, how many H1 tags can I

have on a page? Does it matter if I have 20? Do I only need to keep one, et cetera? And he essentially

said, you can have as many as you want. Do whatever you want. Now, technically, that's correct

you can have as many H1s as you want on the page. But when it comes to SEO H1 tag best practices

you don't want to do that. You want to have one H1 tag on the page

You want it to be the first element after your navigation menu above the content

and you only want to stick to one. And the reason why is, because if you have multiple H1 tags on the page

that's going to dilute the SEO ranking power for that H1, because when Google comes and crawls the page

and they see 10 H1 tags, for example, and you have all these different keywords in there

you can confuse the algorithm as to what the main topic is for the page

because the H1 tag is supposed to serve as the main topic. And that's why it's so powerful

You can put your keyword in there, and if you eliminate all the other H1s and just have one

then you're sending a very clear signal that, hey, this is what the page is about, this is what it should be ranked for

And so just keep it simple. Do one H1 tag on the page. Don't do any more

There's no reason to get fancy here. Now the fifth tip is

you want to make sure that your H1 tag stands out. So the first couple tips were just about

here's how we improve the SCEA ranking power for the algorithm so we can get ranked higher in Google

Well, the H1 tag also is a benefit for the user, and so you want to make sure that it stands out

And to do that, you simply just have to make sure that it's a big, bold font

and it's something noticeable in the page. You don't want to make an H1 tag that's hidden

You don't want to put it at the bottom of the page or in the middle of the page. Keep it simple, follow the best practices here, make your H1 the biggest font on the page up at the top, at the top of the content, and then H2s should be a little bit smaller font, H3 should be a little bit smaller, et cetera, et cetera, so that visually the user can see that, hey, the H1 is the biggest important part of this topic, and H2 is a subsection, so it's a little bit smaller, H3 is a little bit smaller, and so forth and so forth

That's all you want to do here. You don't need to get fancy with this

You don't need to put it in different places. You don't need to style it weird or any of that stuff

Just make it big, bold, and noticeable for the user so that when they land on your page, again

they'll see that they're matching the user intent with your content so that they'll end up reading the rest of the page

So a couple of other things I want to talk about is, can the title tag and the H1 be the same

And this is a good question. Because a lot of people wonder, hey, I have this meta title that I'm using to entice people to click on my web page and the search results

Should the H1 be the exact same thing as that meta title? Or can they be different

Well, according to Google's own recommendations, which I linked to here, you're encouraged to match your page's meta title tag and the H1

And changing up the order a bit is not a problem Or having a few extra words here and there is not a problem either And so the best practice here is to make your H1 and your metadata the same but you don have to

So for example, I give an example here on my site where I usually will make them the same

unless there's some information I just need to remove because it's not necessary for the actual page

And the example I give is I have a page on my site that talks about the best SEO books to learn

search engine optimization. And the meta title is this. 20 best SEO books for 2021

Learn search engine optimization. And the reason I wrote that is because I want to entice people

to click on that in the search results. So if you saw that when you looked for best SEO books

you're going to see, oh, wow, he's got 20 books. That's a lot. I wonder what those are

Oh, they're current for the year 2021. Hey, this looks like a good result. I'm going to click on it because

it's meeting what I'm looking for in the search engine. But then if you go to the page

which I link to here, the H1 tag is, best SEO books to learn search engine optimization

So I've got my main keyword in there, best SEO books, but I stripped out the number 20

and I stripped out for 2021 because I don't necessarily need that on the page. So I just took

those out and I made it more simple. Now I could have left them in there. if I wanted to. But to be honest, the reason I do it that way is because on my content

on every site I own, I always update the year each year so that it's more relevant for the user

when they're searching. And so that just makes it easier for me to update one field each year when I

go to adjust those. So I can use a tool that will update all the years in my meta titles all

at once, so I don't have to do it by hand. And that's just a simple way for me to do that. And also, too, you know, there might come a time when I might update this list and make it 25 best books or 30 best books, etc

And so I can just edit the page and quickly just get that updated without having to change the H1 tag

So that's just the reason I'm doing it, but you can match them. And that's my next example is I have another post on my page on my site that talks about how to add keywords to a website for SEO

20 spots in HTML. So that's my title tag and that's my H1. They're copied. They're the same

I didn't strip anything out. I didn't add anything different, et cetera, et cetera. I just made them

the same because it didn't matter. I didn't have to take anything out for the user. And so you can do that

You can make them the same. You can just make them a little bit different. But the key here is you just

want to make sure that you keep your main keyword in that field and you keep that keyword as close

to the beginning as possible, if not starting with the keyword phrase, because that's going to

give you the most SEO ranking power. Now, I hope this was useful. I have a lot more videos on my

channel that talk about how to do SEO, on-page optimization, and other things that you can use

to boost the rankings of your site. So I encourage you to check those out. And if you haven't

subscribed to the channel yet, I encourage you to do that too, because then you'll get an alert every time I put out a new video. And if there was any part of this video you liked, please

hit the thumbs up button because that helps it rank higher. And I look forward to seeing you on the

video