What Are H Tags and How Do They Help SEO?

Those who are seasoned in the ways of SEO will know there are tactics and optimisation that come and go, and what would help rank a website one day, suddenly becomes something that detracts from that ranking.

On the other hand Oxygen Marketing say that, there are certain ranking factors that you could call evergreen and are likely to continue to be ranking factors for many years to come.

One of those is H tags, and while they are relatively simple aspects of SEO, a surprisingly high number of people are confused by what they are. In addition to that, they are unsure how to use H tags within an SEO campaign, and how they can help improve the ranking of a website.

What Are H Tags?

A long time ago, before websites had even been thought of, the main way people were able to access content, was by reading physical print as it existed in newspapers, magazines, and books.

Within those publications, different sizes of text were used to identify specific blocks of content, with one of the most common being the headline that appeared at the top of a story in a magazine or newspaper. In the printing world, that larger text was known as the header text

That same principle applies to websites where the larger text is used at the top of pages to identify what the content on those pages is about. The name given to that larger text is also called the header text.

The specific size of the header text is identified by a number and therefore the largest header text is represented by the letter ‘H’ (for header) and the number 1. This is the H1 tag.

As the size of header text decreases the number also changes, but inversely, so the higher the number, the smaller the header text. Therefore, the full set of H tags in order of decreasing text size is H1, H2, H3, H4, H5, and H6.

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