There is endless debate surrounding how Google ranks pages and if using H1 header tags has any affect on scoring. Whilst not the most important tag it is still a useful way to emphasize the meaning of your content; both to search engines and human readers.

A few things are clear:

· H1 tags are easy to set up, highly controllable, and often overlooked

· judicious use of H1 tags can bring order to your site,

· properly deployed H1’s make it easier for searchers to understand what content likely lives on each page and how they differ from other pages on your site

· and more importantly, click through conversion rates increase if searchers sense you have a well organized site containing the information that they desire.

· The Google ranking algorithm dictates that if you’re using a <h1> tag, then the text in between this tag must be more important than the content on the rest of the page.

Some folks will argue whether to limit them to 65 versus 70 characters and if they should or should not repeat words from your title tag or body text. If you feel the urge to use more than one H1 tag on a page, resist and consider breaking the page into two. Feel free to use multiple H2 and H3 tags as necessary to highlight your postings and content.

Since H1’s give searchers clues as to the content contained on a page, it does not make sense to have more than one. By sending confusing clues to the content on your pages, humans will likely skip over your site in the search engine results page, even if you manage to rank high.

If your heading text appears too large, do not demote it to H2 to reduce its size - By default, H1 tags aren’t the prettiest in terms of formatting, so using a CSS style to override the default look is usually a good idea: H1 { color: blue; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 16px }.

The key to getting the most mileage from your H1’s is to use them once per page, make sure they contain keywords that accurately describe the content on the page they represent, and make sense to humans and search engine robots alike.

It’s not always about SEO. Your headlines should give the reader a fair idea of what the page contains. If done properly, it will both generate interest, and help your reader decide if your web page contains the information he or she is looking for. Even if they go somewhere else, they’ll appreciate your copy content for helping them make a quick decision.

The default mission of robots, more commonly known as spiders, is to crawl the web and meticulously index each site, archive important data and follow every link. Since they have been programmed to do this at birth, you do not have to tell them to act naturally.

The question then becomes why would you not want them to index, archive or track down the links on your site? Although nobody knows the specific algorithms that  search giants use to calculate page rank, we can safely assume that duplicate data does not help your cause.

If you haven’t done so already, make it your goal to get the “right” pages to rank well. Picking those pages should be a fairly straightforward task. If you would like the robots to focus on your product centric pages, make sure you direct them to not look at shopping carts, account login pages, driving directions and your returns or shipping policies.

Many sites include tons of duplicate data, CGI scripts, and temporary data that can be easily made to be overlooked by the robots with the robots.txt file or a robots meta tag.

Think of a site that includes multiple pages for items that are sold in the various colors under the sun. One sweater may have 10 or more pages, plus the master item page. By having the robots skip over the various flavors, you can have them concentrate on the more important item master.

Many sites include “printer friendly” versions of each page, or Adobe PDF versions available for download. These provide another rich source of repetitive data that should be made off limits to the robots, to help them do their job better.

Similarly you can direct the robots to not archive certain pages as well. This is of particular importance if you run “buy it now” type sales and hate negotiating after the sale expiration date with aggressive bargain hunters.

A couple of cases come to mind where you may want to have the robots skip over some select links. First, if your website has pages that must be read in a specific order, such as a multiple page registration form, they could easily be mis-interpreted if taken out of context by the robots. The second is if you remove pages often and wish to avoid unnecessary Error 404’s.

By helping robots do their job better, ultimately you help searchers. On your quest to eliminate duplicate data and steer the robots away from non-essential parts of your website, you make it easier for searchers to get what they need faster without wading through duplicate listings. A worthy cause for both robots and humans alike.

Many folks concentrate all their SEO efforts on ranking highly with the various search engines, but this does you little good if nobody clicks through to your site. If you rushed the effort to create Meta Tags (or did not write them) for your website you are leaving your click-through rate up to chance.

Meta Tags are important because they serve to drive traffic to your web site from the search engines. They may not help you rank higher, but they definitely help increase conversions.

Many people have lost focus on Meta Tags since stuffing them full of key words no longer works to increase your page rank. Please don’t get misty eyed about the good old days just yet. You can use Meta Tags strategically since they allow you to control how your web page is described by many search engines.

By investing some time in nailing a truly descriptive tag, you make it easier for humans to know what content to expect from your site, from the many search engine results. This will help you dramatically increase your click-through rate.

The added information in the Meta Tags allows humans with varying search motivations to get to the site they need faster, with less frustration. By providing clues to the content on your site through these mini text advertisements, you provide a valuable service to searchers and start off your relationship with them in a positive manner.

If you are having a hard time coming up with an interesting Meta Tag, your problem may lie upstream with your website content. Avoid the temptation to try to drive business to an uninspired site with an overly ambitious description.

Since various search engines have not standardized on the lengths of Meta Tags, play it safe and try to stay under 160 characters to avoid an awkward truncation. Keeping them brief is tough, but like any good ad copy, shorter is usually better.

Whatever you do; don’t pass up on this critical link to driving traffic to your website.