These are all things I’ve seen SEOs discuss over the years, and while some of them mattered in the old days of SEO, things don’t work that way anymore.

Before we dive into when HTML does and doesn’t matter for SEO, we need to throw out a few caveats.

100% HTML structure is still important for accessibility.

However, accessibility isn’t a direct ranking factor, so it’s a bit beyond the scope of this article.

I will note, as others have pointed out on X, that if your site is not accessible, people are less likely to link or click on it in the future, so tin it can affect your SEO ranking.

The Newly Updated Google SEO Getting Started Guide it even specifically mentions heading tags and accessibility vs. SEO:

“Having your headings in semantic order is great for screen readers, but from Google Search’s perspective, it doesn’t matter if you use them out of order. The web in general is not valid HTML, so Google Search can rarely rely on the semantic meanings hidden in the HTML specification.

There is also no magic, ideal amount of headings that any given page should have. However, if you think it’s too much, it probably is.”

But what about the rest of the HTML structure?

The main problem here is our mental model of how search engines work. For most people, this model hasn’t changed since the 1990s, when search engines were primarily lexical search. In other words, find the document with the most mentions of the term.

These search engines had scoring features that gave more weight to occurrences of the term in bold and counted an H1 more than an H2, etc.

Unfortunately for our mental model, search has moved away from a lexical approach and more towards a semantic approach.

In semantic search, content is converted into vectors and algorithms like BERT, RankBrain, etc. are used to interpret the “meaning” of the query and content, not just look at what words it contains. In the process of converting the content to vectors, most of the HTML is lost.

Not only vectors come into play here, but also representation. Before search engines could render JavaScript and examine the DOM, they had to rely on HTML suggestions, but those days are long gone.

Just as they can use algorithms like passage-bert to identify the most relevant part of the page, they can also use various algorithms to determine the main heading, even if it’s not on the page.

Tag.

For sure,

is a clue here, but so is font size, content-relevant placement, and the actual sentence. We’ve all seen so many SEOs mark off some of the navigation with an H1 despite having a giant 30-point text in the middle of the screen that’s just a Tag.

In the old days, search engines had trouble here, but these days, they can often correctly identify this giant. tag as “heading” of the page.

That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t use appropriate H-tags and nested elements. Remember that accessibility is still important to give a clue to search engines. It will be cleaner, easier, more accessible, and generally better if you do. I’m just saying that search engines don’t just rely on markup.

Another misconception is multiple H1 tags. This is one of my biggest pet peeves.

With the introduction of HTML5 and multiple elements, it’s completely normal (and in some accessibility cases, mandatory) to have multiple H1 tags on a page. This is not something that will affect your SEO efforts. (Unless you’re stuffing keywords and marking everything as H1, which might trigger some spam signals.)

So what does a search engine do? (I’m going to oversimplify here, as I could go deeper into information retrieval and I’d love to do that with beers anytime.)

In a nutshell:

They will detect the title tag, key headings (which may or may not be H1, H2, etc.) and body copy. They will then run both lexicons (e.g. BM25) and semantics (e.g. cosine similarity) measures to determine the relevance of these sections to the query before feeding them all into a machine learning algorithm and classification.

The bottom line is that they probably don’t care if it’s an H1 or H2 anymore, just that their algorithm has identified it as a “heading” on the page.

The same goes for bold text, span and div tags, etc. It’s about whether the algorithm (eg BERT) says it’s relevant to the query.

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So where does HTML structure matter?

HTML structure can make or break your SEO strategy in many cases. For example, putting the canonical tag on the file instead of the will not be seen

Likewise, if you put a

in your tag, then Chrome’s version of Googlebot will assume you forgot to close the head and start the body and do it for you, possibly moving some of your important SEO tags into the body where they’ll be ignored.

You won’t believe how often I see this. All it takes is one person accidentally pasting the code into the wrong place in Google Tag Manager to break your entire site. For this reason alone, I tell clients to make sure their SEO tags are higher than any other label.

Other HTML coding techniques can also hurt SEO.

For example, if instead of using a tag with the href attribute, your site has one with an onclick= event, search engines won’t count it as a link, even if users don’t notice the difference. It also has some accessibility issues, so stop doing that.

When it comes to images, search engines require one tag with a src= attribute. You’d be surprised how many lazy-loading plugins skip src= in favor of srcset=, which, according to my latest tests, works in modern browsers but Google doesn’t treat as an “image” for image classification.

I don’t think any of these examples were what Illyes meant when he talked about the HTML structure. I think he was referring to the usual arguments for nesting headings, bold tags, etc.

TL;DR

Should I be concerned about my use of H1s, H2s, etc.?

Yes, always, but not for SEO. Mark things up in a way that’s accessible and makes sense to users. Don’t stress to force it

tag that has a style that looks like normal text.

Do I need to validate my HTML?

Yes, but not for SEO rankings. Valid HTML is not a ranking factor, but it will help prevent technical issues that affect SEO i potentially reducing your accessibility work. I’m a big fan of the W3C validator.

Does HTML structure matter for SEO?

It depends. (Sorry, I couldn’t resist!) If your markup makes things inaccessible or out of view, yes, it does matter. If you’re hoping to get a ranking boost by rearranging some headings or bolding some text, it’s probably not going to happen.

The views expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Search Engine Land. Staff authors are listed here.

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