What is the H1 Tag?

The h1 tag is the highest level HTML heading, which are hierarchical headings found in body element of a document, numbering from h1 (most important) to h6 (least important). They serve as headings for individual areas of the page, and are usually styled to show their relative importance, with h1 typically being the largest font size on the page.

Headings are best thought of as the outline of the document: The h1 is the headline or title of the page or article, h2s are each top-level points, and other lower heading levels are sub-points.

A typical h1 tag:

<h1>Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit</h1> 

While a page can have multiple h2, h3, h4, or other heading tags, it's generally a best practice to only have one h1. Because it is the highest level heading, and because there is only one of them, this content area is typically given a high amount of weight by search engines. Perhaps second to the title tag, the h1 is usually the most important place for keywords on the page. Including keywords here is a good indicator that the page content is relevant to these words.

What Does "Multiple H1s" Mean?

If there are more than one h1 tags in the source of the page, the URL has multiple h1s.

Why It's Important

While a relatively lower-importance issue, it's best practice to have only one h1 on each page. This makes it easier for both humans and search engines to understand the hierarchy of the page content. It will also prevent the watering down of the keyword value by having too much content in the h1 tag.

How to Fix

Re-organize the content on each page in the table below so that each URL only has one h1 tag. A good way to do this is to convert additional h1s to h2 tags.

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