How important are Title and H1 tags to search engine rankings?

The title and h1 tags are something to be aware of when considering search engine rankings.

The Title Tag

The text you place in the title tag (in the HTML markup code it is the text between between <TITLE> and </TITLE>) appears n the title bar of the browser when someone views the page.

What text should I place in my Title Tag?

• Use relevant keywords or phrases relating directly to the content of your website.
• Don't make the title too long (probably 65 characters or less).
• You can incorporate the name of your company or website if it is a relevant keyword or phrase, but sometimes more relevant keywords or phrases might be better.
• Avoid having page titles exactly the same.

The H1 Tag

This is the tag that is usually used to denote the main header for a page.  In this case, if you look at the HTML source code of this page it will contain:

<h1>How important are Title and H1 tags to search engine rankings?</h1>

Header tags come in one of six standard varieties denoted as h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6. These tags are in descending order of importance when viewed by a search engine crawler.  Therefore, the h1 tag really needs to be a descriptive overview of what the page content is all about.  It will probably fairly closely match the content of the Title tag.

Avoid putting more than one h1 tag per page (our websites do this by default).  It makes good structural sense too, to use the lower level tags (say h2 and h3) for sub-headers.