What is SEO?
SEO refers to Search Engine Optimisation. It is a process of increasing the website or webpage visibility when people search using certain keywords that are related to or rather used in the website. So, a lot of websites use this as a marketing strategy to increase their website traffic and rank higher in searches.
There are a lot factors that affect SEO when building a site. But how do HTML header tags come into picture?
Header tags play an important role in on-page SEO. They tell what your website is about, the overall context of the website or the webpage. Search engines give the header tags more importance than the rest. When search engines crawl your website, they read the header tags. So keep your header tags small and specific so that search engines can pickup the accurate keywords.
The first 3 header tags- h1, h2 and h3 carry more SEO value than the rest(h4, h5, h6). Choose your title carefully when giving values in these tags. Give importance hierarchically, meaning put more essence to h1, then the subheading h2, and then h3. Keep the context same, as it will be easy for the crawlers to recognise correct keywords.
Below is a basic example showing how you may use your header tags:
<h1>Header tags and SEO</h1>
<h2>What is SEO and importance of header tags in SEO</h2>
<h3>How should you use header tags effectively?</h3>
This example fairly shows certain keywords that might be easily extracted. Well, the game doesn't end here. You may get a lot of competition, only using header tags isn't going to help but is a great factor in deciding the rank of a website.