When you look at web pages today, they are designed to look slick and cool. CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) have made this possible by giving designers the control to make fluid and organic designs. All html tags can be stylistically controlled and many of the original basic html tags may seem outdated. Who needs html H codes to make big font when you can do it with CSS? But, by looking at the history of html, we can understand why <H> tags are still important and why they should not be thought of as a graphical element.

The history of html tags
Let’s hop in our time machine and go back a few decades to 1989, the beginning of the history of html. This is the year that Tim Berners-Lee came up with the concept that would eventually become the Internet as we know it. What is important to note here is that he developed the Internet for a group of physicists so that they could share scientific papers. 

The beginning of basic html tags
The original basic html tags were developed with scientific papers in mind. Html H codes were among the original group of tags developed. If you look at a scientific paper, you can see why. A research paper can be broken into parts. There is a title to the document, which is your <H1> tag. The paper is organized based on the ideas that need to be conveyed. These are your <H2> tags. These ideas are supported by main facts, your <H3> tags – which are supported by paragraphs, the <P> tags.

<H> html tags and search engines
Let’s get back into the time machine to skip ahead a few years in the history of html, to 1993, when the first search engines crawled from the quagmire of the emerging Internet. CSS didn’t yet exist and html H codes were a very important part of organizing and graphically displaying text on web pages.  Because the most important information on web pages was contained in these html tags, these <H> tags became important parts of the algorithms that drive how a search engine displays information.

Modern search engine algorithms and <H> html tags
Let’s now come back to today’s Internet. Search engine algorithms are now long complicated equations and simply telling them to ignore some of the basic html tags that it was first based on is not possible. Nor would they want to, as there are still many websites that correctly use html H codes. In my next article, I will go over how your designers and developers can correctly use <H> tags on your site to help it do better in the search engines.

Meanwhile, please post your questions and comments!