The Importance of <H1> Tags vs. Images
What are heading tags?
Heading tags are important for websites if you want to rank well in searches. It is definitely not the one thing that puts you over the top but using heading tags properly along with other smart SEO practices will certainly help.
How are title tags structured?
Headings are labeled from <h1> through <h6>. Some people think the bigger the number, the bigger the font size on my site. While this is true, it really means the importance of the content within, 1 being the most important and 6 being the least. The size of the header tags can be controlled by using CSS style sheets. A typical structure would look like this on a page:
- Heading H1 (main title of page)
- Heading H2 (subtitles of a section or paragraph) Note: other tags, H3, H4 could be used for subtitles
This basically means the title is the most important part of the page and each beginning section after that has an <H2> or similar tag which would be followed by a paragraph. Search engine bots would recognize this when they crawl your site.
You place the most important keywords in the main title or <H1> tag. Don't keyword stuff the title. It has to make sense if you are reading it.
What happens if you use an image in place of an <h1> tag?
Search engine crawlers see text, not images. Crawlers are starting to do a better job of seeing text in images but this is still not the best of practices. If you use a nice flashy image for your heading tags, the important message you are trying to get across will not be found in the search engines very well.
Don’t get me wrong, it is okay to use images in your site but use text where appropriate. Images are just that, pictures or art.
