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How important are H1 tags in SEO?

I noticed neither Indie Hackers or Nomad List or Product Hunt seems to have any tagline, explaining their product wrapped in h1 tags.

I thought this went against conventional SEO wisdom. Perhaps it doesn't matter, or @csallen, @levelsio, @rrhoover have slipped in an h1 tag somewhere?

Anyone with SEO knowledge, would love some advice.

#ask-ih

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    H1 tags are an important keyword factor together with title. Just remember not to use multiple h1 headers and not overoptimalize. The h1 and title keywords should go together with a great content to that topic.

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    The 3 most important ranking factors are content, links and RankBrain.

    Focus on those and don't worry too much about H1s 😉

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    When I launched my new crypto directory https://CRYPTOSTAR.MONEY I got a one month free contract with ryte.com. They crawl you site and find SEO issues. They regard it as very important to have exactly one H1 heading on each page.

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    We all still use h1 tags, actually. Go to almost* any of the pages on IH, Nomad List, or PH that we care about ranking highly on Google, e.g. interviews, blog posts, product pages, city pages, etc., and you'll be likely to find an h1 tag.

    And none of us are particularly worried that our homepages won't be found by Google, or that Google won't be able to read the title tag.

    *Posts are IH are missing it, actually, but I'm moving them out of modals and onto their own pages, at which point they'll have an h1 tag again.

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      "I'm moving them out of modals and onto their own pages" - yes please! The modal view confuses me every time! 😂

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      Cheers Courtland.

      Why doesn't it matter that your homepage won't be found? I'd have naively assumed that that was the most important page.

      Surely if someone googles, "community of founders..." or whatever you'd want to rank?

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        It's not that we don't care if our homepages are found. It's more that we know our homepages will be found regardless. I get lots of search traffic to my homepage. That said, it's mostly from people googling "Indie Hackers" or something similar.

        The websites you listed — NL, IH, and PH — are somewhat unique in that the value we provide isn't something people search Google for often. For example, "community of founders" gets almost no search traffic, therefore it's not something I care about ranking for. None of us have One Big Keyword™ that we want to rank for. I suppose mine could be "make money online," but meh.

        So for all of us, any SEO strategy is going to come from tangential pages we create. For example, Nomad List might want to rank for "travel tips to [insert country]," and Product Hunt might want to rank for "best podcast player" and stuff like that. But only because these are high-value keywords.

        With SEO, you want to work backwards from keywords that are well-trafficked rather than working forwards from whatever your site just so happens to do.

        TL;DR — Your homepage isn't always a great SEO landing page.

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          thanks sir. very well explained

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