Recently, Mueller shared his opinions about heading tags, he answered by telling the importance of heading tags which impact ranking.

Impact of Different Heading Tags

In Webmaster Central Hangout, someone asked Mueller,

“A page without an H1 title will it still rank for keywords which is in the H2 title?”

Mueller Replied on this,

“Of course.

…Will it still? I don’t know if it will still but it can. It can absolutely.”

Recommendation – Google Cleared Misconceptions About Canonicalization

Impact On Page Ranking

Mueller explained the impact of heading tags on page ranking, he said

“So headings on a page help us to better understand the content on the page.

Headings on the page are not the only ranking factor that we have.

We look at the content on its own as well.

But sometimes having a clear heading on a page gives us a little bit more information on what that section is about.”

He also told that headings are important for Image SEO as well.

“So in particular when it comes to images, that’s something where headings and the context of that image helps us a lot to understand where we should be showing that image in search.

…images are not text. We don’t automatically know what we should be showing it for.

And that combination of the image plus the landing page is something that depends quite a bit on the text of the page.”

According to Mueller, heading tags are the attractive signal that makes the whole content clear.

Mueller Stated:

“And when it comes to text on a page, a heading is a really strong signal telling us this part of the page is about this topic.

…whether you put that into an H1 tag or an H2 tag or H5 or whatever, that doesn’t matter so much.

But rather kind of this general signal that you give us that says… this part of the page is about this topic. And this other part of the page is maybe about a different topic.

So that’s generally what I would think about there.”

Ways to Use Headings In Seo

Heading are the one the important Ranking factor of SEO, it does not matter which tag is used. The thing that matters is tag must be used to send the signal to Google about the content. This helps to Google to understand the content better and improve the ranking.