header tags
Also called: heading tags, H1-H6, h1 tag, heading elements
Header tags (also called heading tags) are the HTML elements <h1> through <h6> that label sections of a page and define its content hierarchy, with <h1> the top level and <h6> the lowest. They help readers skim and let browsers and assistive tech build a structural outline of the page.
Think of header tags as the outline of your page. <h1> names the whole page, <h2> marks main sections, and the lower levels (<h3> down to <h6>) nest subsections beneath them. Browsers and screen readers turn that markup into a navigable outline. MDN notes that “heading information can be used by user agents to construct a table of contents for a document automatically,” and screen-reader users commonly jump heading to heading to scan a page.
Practical rules
- Use one descriptive
<h1>per page that states the topic, similar to the<title>. - Nest in order without skipping levels (h1, then h2, then h3).
- Never pick a heading level for its font size; style with CSS instead.
<h1>On-Page SEO</h1>
<h2>Title tags</h2>
<h2>Header tags</h2>
<h3>H1 vs H2</h3>Do headings move rankings on their own? Google is blunt: “Having your headings in semantic order is fantastic for screen readers, but from Google Search perspective, it doesn’t matter if you’re using them out of order.” So heading order and count are not direct ranking factors. What headings actually do is make content skimmable for people and parseable for machines that extract passages, which is where clean structure earns its keep in both classic search and AI answer engines.
How it affects your traffic
Header tags rarely win rankings by themselves, but sloppy heading structure quietly caps a page's ceiling. A vague or missing H1, or a wall of text with no H2s, makes a page harder for readers to skim and harder for Google and AI answer engines to segment into the passage that answers a query. In our On-Page SEO work, tightening heading hierarchy is one of the first fixes we make because it improves readability, accessibility, and passage-level relevance at once, which feeds better engagement and citation odds across the whole page.
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