The Importance of H1 and H2 in Google
The "H" in H1 and H2 stands for "heading." So, the H1 is your first page heading; H2 occurs further down the page. Google places some importance on the words found in an H1 tag and to a lesser extent the words in H2. Nonetheless, H1 and H2 tags have very little weight when it comes to getting your site ranked higher in Google results.
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Google
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Google decides which website to list first in particular search results based on more than 200 different factors. "On-page" factors include elements such as the written content and your headings, including H1 and H2. "Off-page" factors include links from other websites. Only Google engineers know the relative importance of each factor. Easily manipulated signals, such as the keywords found in an H1 tag, tend to be a little less important than factors such as inbound links or relevant content.
H1 and H2
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The HTML code for a heading tag works like this: <h1>The H1 words go here</h1>. The H1 tag usually sits at the start of written content, much like a newspaper headline. Subsequent headings, such as H2, act as subheadings. If you don't specify a font size, most browsers automatically render the H1 tag in larger font than H2, which in turn looks bigger than H3 and so on. In theory, the H1 tag summarizes the content.
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Heading Importance
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Rand Fishkin from search marketing company SEOMoz suggests that H1 tags do have some minor importance to Google, but they're no more important than larger font text within your main content. H2 tags carry even less weight. Nonetheless, an H1 tag relevant to the page content will add some useful keywords to the page. Tony Soric writes on Search Engine Land that the H1 tag offers some benefit in terms of Google rankings, albeit a very minor one. Spam-style activities such as stuffing your headings with keywords may negatively impact your rankings.
Considerations
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While your H1 and H2 tags won't get you to the top of search results by themselves, they do offer other benefits for your website content. A good H1 heading helps a user understand the content below and decide if she's on the right page. Proper use of headings also makes a website more accessible to disabled users. For example, having two H1 tags on a single page can cause problems for people using screen-reading programs to view a website. Keeping your headings tags in semantic order helps the software read the content.
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