An H1 heading is the main, top-level heading of a web page. In the page’s code it is wrapped in an <h1> tag, and it is usually the largest, most prominent line of text, the one that answers the question “what is this page about?” before a visitor reads anything else.
Think of a page like a newspaper article. The H1 is the big front-page headline; everything below it, the H2 and H3 subheadings, are the section titles that organise the rest of the story. Screen readers rely on this order to let blind users jump straight to the content, and search engines read it to understand structure. It is part of the basic HTML that gives a page its shape.
A good H1 is specific and human. “Affordable Solar Panels in Rotterdam” beats a vague “Welcome” because it tells both the reader and Google exactly what they will find, and it usually echoes the search term that brought the visitor in.
A common mistake is treating the H1 purely as a styling choice. Some teams wrap their logo in an <h1> on every page, which means each page claims the same heading, or they style a smaller heading to look big and skip the real H1 entirely. Both break the outline that assistive tech and crawlers depend on. The fix is simple: pick one phrase that names this specific page, mark it as the H1, and let CSS handle how large it looks separately.
At TopDevs we set one clear, keyword-aware H1 on every page we build, so each page has a single obvious subject for visitors and search engines alike.
