Let me begin by saying that you should never abuse the heading tags hoping to see an increase in your organic search rankings. Heading tags are nothing new to search engines, and the big search engines like Google do a great job of filtering out sites that spam these tags in hope of better rankings. Heading tags should only be used to help correctly structure your sites content. Let's take a look at what heading tags are, and how they can be used to benefit your SEO (Search Engine Optimization) efforts.
I'm going to assume you know what heading tags like H1 are, and instead of explaining how they work, I'm going to explain how they can help you in your search engine optimization efforts.
Again, the use of heading tags should first and foremost, be to better structure your websites content. This means that each page should have one, and only one H1 tag. The H1 tag has the most weight and it is used to best describe all of the content on a specific page. The H1 tag should be placed near the top of the page, and it should be the first heading tag on a page. You do not want a tag like H2 to show up before the H1 tag. Make sure your H1 tag correctly describes the page content. But, also be aware that this is one of the best places to put your keyword or keyword phrase you are trying to target with that page. As long as your keyword phrase makes sense as the main title of that page, use it. This will give you a nice bump in SEO if you use it correctly.
H2 and H3 tags are also useful for SEO. You can use each multiple times on a single page. Just be sure to structure everything correctly (keeping H3 tags after H2 tags). You don't want your structure to be:
<H1>
<H3>
<H3>
<H2>
<H3>
But you would like it structured like:
<H1>
<H2>
<H2>
<H3>
<H2>
If search engines see that your use and structure of heading tags is incorrect, they'll penalize you. They will assume that you are trying to spam the tags in order to get better rankings in their search engine. However, if you use the tags correctly, they'll give you a nice boost in rankings.
Its also worth noting that when you style your heading tags with CSS, be sure H1 is the largest size font, and as the heading number increases, the size of the font decreases. You can use CSS to get your H1 font size into something that works with your website's design, but be sure the H1 tag is the largest sized font on that page. Search engines are smart enough to see if you're trying to fit H1 tags into a page at a regular sized font. If they think you're trying to cheat, you'll get penalized. I've seen a number of poorly ranked websites with numerous H1 tags on the same page, and they use CSS to make the H1 font size the same as the font size for the body text of the site. It's clear that they are only using the H1 tags to try and better their rankings, without using them as they were designed for. Search engines like Google will notice this right away and penalize your site for trying to abuse heading tags. If it's bad enough, they may review your site and completely drop you from their search results.
You should use heading tags on every page possible. Just remember, use them in the correct spots, make sure they are still look like headings (not like regular text on the page), and that you include your keyword phrases whenever possible within them.
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