Published on May 07, 2011 Use H1 tags to help your search engine marketing
To make the biggest impact in the minds of your customers, a general rule of thumb in all kinds of marketing is to communicate the most important message with the strongest possible voice. In advertising this may mean using high attention media or placing the message in large bold typefaces.
In search engine marketing, this principle means communicating your main message with the biggest and brightest voice available to you on the web: H1 tags.
What are H1 tags? Web pages are created using a series of tags that define the parts of the page, the content within those parts, and the formatting. H tags define headlines, with the numbers after them acting like a priority system. The most important tags on a page are defined as being H1 and the least important ones defined as H6. For this reason, H1 tags are accepted as headings and usually page headings. This is a generally accepted principle of web design.
While it’s true that you could stylise any tag to look like a major heading, and then use an H1 to be a small and unobtrusive link, it doesn’t make sense to do that and we would question why anyone would want to do this. That’s because although the actual formatting is what matters to customers viewing a page, to search engines its an entirely different matter. No matter where they are on the page, H1 tags are weighted very heavily by the search engines. Your most important message should appear in them – and nothing else.
In an online store, you would want your category or page headings using H1 tags if possible, or if the products sit under a familiar brand or family of products – that name is used in the H1 tags. This would be preferable to having irrelevant content in your H1 tags and styling other tags to look like major headings.
While it’s easy to configure an Ozcart shopping cart store to use H1 tags for page and category headings (and our support staff will be happy to help you configure the H1 tags you can’t yourself), not all shopping carts are created equal and control of your H1 tags is not always a given. In fact, some providers will restrict the use of these tags for promotion of themselves. We think that’s wrong as it helps the shopping cart provider sell more of their product, but it does not help you. It would be like your phone company putting a recorded message on the front of every call you receive with a message like “This call was brought to you by Telstra” before the connection was made. Telstra wouldn’t do it, and nor should your shopping cart provider.
Since Google may penalise you for having excessive H1 tags used in a page, it pays to check before you buy or you could end up putting yourself at a potential disadvantage in the search engines before your store even opens.
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