Google’s John Mueller discussed heading elements with a member of the SEO community where he affirmed the usefulness of using hierarchical structure when using heading elements.

Background Context to What Mueller Said

Heading elements

–

are supposed to be used to indicate what a section of a webpage is about.

Furthermore the heading elements have a ranking order, with the

being the highest rank of importance and the

being the lowest level of importance.

The heading element purpose is to label what a section of content is about.

HTML specifications allow the use of multiple

elements. So, technically, using more than one

is perfectly valid.

Section 4.3.11 of the official HTML specifications states:

“h1–h6 elements have a heading level, which is given by the number in the element’s name.

If a document has one or more headings, at least a single heading within the outline should have a heading level of 1.”

Nevertheless, using more than on

is not considered a best practice.

The Mozilla developer reference page about the use of headings recommends:

“The

to

HTML elements represent six levels of section headings.

is the highest section level and

is the lowest.

…Avoid using multiple

elements on one page

While using multiple

elements on one page is allowed by the HTML standard (as long as they are not nested), this is not considered a best practice. A page should generally have a single

element that describes the content of the page (similar to the document’s