Are H1 tags important or influential?

[WebRiverGroup]

We are in the process of correcting our site in hopes that Google will rank us higher in the SERP. We have many pages that have multiple H1 tags or no H1 tag at all.

How important is the H1 tag?

Will it help us increase our ranking on Google?

Thanks

[OlegKorneitchouk]

Yes, it will help improve rankings if your content is lacking relevance. They are no where near as important of an influence on SEO as they used to be but are still influential. Think of them as in content title tags.

Each page should have a unique H1 tag that describes the pages content and contains the target keyword.

[TextMarketing]

H1 tags are pretty important as they are meant to be the header of what the entire pages is about. Every page should have 1 and only 1 H1 tag and should definitely contain your most targeted keyword.

It's OK to have multiple H2, H3, H4 tags though. Although they don't count as much as an H1 does, it's still important to include your keywords in these tags when applicable too. Make sure that you're not "keyword stuffing" either.

So to answer your question, yes, if you don't have H1 tags on a page, and then add them in with the appropriate keywords, they will def help your on page optimization!

Hope that helps!

[Christy-Correll]

Unlike the title tag, including keywords in your H1 will not improve your rankings in the SERPs any more than placing keyword anywhere high up in the code will. That said, including a keyword in your H1 is great for usability, which can increase conversions. When a user clicks on a search result (which includes keywords in the title tag), it is reassuring to click-through to a page with the same keywords prominently displayed.

Marking up your HTML with header tags is also very important for communicating the organization of your page to screen readers, which are used by the vision-impaired to browse the web.