: Does not using in pages adversely affect SEO? My company's website uses page templates that don't include an <h1> element anywhere in the page. The main heading, as seen by the user,

@Candy875

Its very easy to implement a clean page structure, so by not having a h1 or by having two h1s on a page with irrelevant keywords is just simply lazy coding.

You can argue how much or little it would effect a page rank, but surely the simple argument is a h1,h2,h3 page structure was invented for a reason, otherwise it wouldn't exist.

In SEO everyone can argue till the end of time about any strategies effectiveness. The one thing everyone will agree with is that every little helps.... so lets get these little things right first time, it doesn't take any longer to do it right first time does it;)

Vote Up Vote Down

@BetL925

All of Stephen Ostermiller's answer is correct and Google is indeed now working to reward quality content rather than elements that are easy to spam. However, having an <h1> tag on a page is good practice and good for accessibility. It tells bots and screen readers that the text within those tags indicates the title on the page. If Google is rewarding well structured pages that are good for human users, then this would be included in that.

It's the kind of thing that is so easy to implement, that it comes under the category of "you might as well." As for the web development company knowing what they were doing - don't assume that. For some reason many web design/development companies think their responsibility ends at how the front-end looks. But the code is also their responsibility, in my opinion, and they should make sure that the sites they build are technically and structurally sound.

Vote Up Vote Down

@Heady270

Its OK not to use H1 tags. On page optimization techniques and page structure matter much less to SEO now than they did even two years ago. You still need to use keywords and synonyms in the text of your pages and the title tag is the place in the page that matter the most. Beyond that, using H1, bold, and link anchor text may help a very small amount if done in moderation. Used too much, with too many occurrences of the keywords you wish to rank for, then your site can suffer an over-optimization penalty.

Three years ago to rank for a keyword the formula was


Make a page featuring that keyword
Put the keyword at the beginning of the title, in the h1, use it several places in the page maybe with a bold
Give the page lots of internal pagerank by linking to it from your site extensively
Start building external links to that page that use the keyword of the anchor text.


Today that is a formula for disaster. Here is what you need to do today:


Build a section of your site (at least several pages) that cover all aspects of that keyword.
Use the keyword and its synonyms in a natural way. Put the keyword in the title, but not always at the beginning, use other related phrases in the titles too.
Link the pages in that section together and link to the section of your site internally, don't use the keyword as anchor text too much.
Do user testing and make sure that your site satisfies people looking for that keyword. (Keep in mind satisfied depends on whether they are looking for info, ready to buy, trying to navigate somewhere, etc.)
Build links to the pages externally. Anchor text should be 50% domain name, 20% "click here" variations, 10% page title, 2% keyword, 18% other. Don't pay or spam for links.


As you can see, Google has made "doing SEO" much harder. They are now trusting on-page signals much less than they used to. They are paying more attention to user reaction to your pages. They are penalizing much more often for keyword stuffing and spammy link building.

Vote Up Vote Down