How Many Characters in an H1?

[mindflash]

Hi,

How long can the text within an H1 tag area be? Should it ideally be 1-2 words or can it be a full sentence? Or more?

[AJPro]

Rule of thumb, the h1 heading  should describe the paragraph / content below it (in not more than one sentence). For the next headings you could use the h2 tag.

Write for the users. Of course you should pick the right words / phrases people use when they search.

Make the headings compelling encouraging the user to keep on reading

[ThompsonPaul]

There's no technical limitation to the length of heading tags (h1, h2 etc) as they're not displayed anywhere other than on the content page. (Unlike the meta-title attribute, for example, that gets truncated on the Search Results page if it's too long.)

Make it just long enough and no longer

What I mean by that is - write it as a heading that clearly communicates the nature of the page it's introducing, but don't waste words. The more words in the header, the less your targeted words will stand out - both to search engines and to users. So cut down on stop words (the, and, if, because etc) and try to get your primary words close to the beginning of the heading if possible.

But as Stefan says - make sure it makes the visitor want to keep reading - otherwise your SEO efforts have been wasted.