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SEO Glossary - H
H1
See Header Tag for the full description of what a Header tag is.
The H1 is the most important of the Header tags for SEO. You should really only have one H1 per page and it should contain the title of what your page is about.
In the HTML of the page a H1 tag looks like: <h1>Your page title here</h1>
Hacked Content
A Blackhat technique that is actually illegal (as it involves hacking third party computers), so I really, really do not suggest you do this, is hacking a website so you can insert content and links on it.
Sometimes the hacks will place content like new pages and outbound links in a way that anyone can see them, this is easier to spot if your site has been hacked in this way. More sophisticated hacks will use cloaking so only Googlebot sees the links and content that has been placed.
Hacking sites to add content is rare, but if you suspect it has happened on your site then use a user-agent switcher plugin on your browser and set the user-agent to Googlebot and then browse your site and see if hacked content is displayed to you.
Head Term
A head term is a keyword which has a huge amount of volume but is usually very broad in terms of intent. Example head terms would be “Broadband”, “Laptops”, “History”.
They are named head terms because they are at the “head” of a graph of search volume and at the opposite end of the graph to the Long Tail queries.
Header (page)
The header of your page design is usually the top part of the page design and is usually common across all (or most) of the pages on your site.
The page header is where you will put your main site navigation and links to common features like shopping baskets, user logins and settings.
Header tag
Header tags are HTML tags that are used to organise the content of your page. They range in hierarchy from H1 being the most significant header to H6 being the least significant.
Helpful Content Update (HCU)
The Helpful Content Update (HCU) is a series of named Google updates, the first being on the 25th August 2022.
The aim of the HCU was to combat what Google might describe as content that was built with the primary purpose of ranking in search engines, which contained mainly sumarised versions of information that could be found elsewhere and which do not bring anything new to the topic they are writing about.
The type of sites that have been hit by the HCU updates have included many of what might be described as “Niche sites”, particularly ones that appeared to have affiliate or display advertising as their primary monetisation route.
The HCU has been a seismic set of updates, similar in effect on some parts of the SEO community as the Panda and Penguin updates were 10 years previously.
Hosting
Hosting (or Web Hosting) is the service that provides you with the physical and logical space on a server (or servers) where your website actually operates from.
A basic hosting service may provide you with some space on a single server shared with multiple other websites. More complex hosting services for more technically complex websites may have component parts hosted and replicated on multiple devices in multiple data centeres worldwide.
Hreflang
A HTML tag that can be used with webpages to define which language and location a web page serves. Especially important for sites that may have multiple variations of a page that serves different locales.
This helps resolve duplicate content issues for very similar but locationally different as well as indicating which version of a page to serve to a user depending upon their location.
htaccess file
The .htaccess file is a configuration file for the Apache web server (and some other web servers also use .htaccess files) that allows you to make various configuration changes. It is most commonly used in SEO for making changes to URL redirects such as implementing 301 redirects.
HTML
HyperText Markup Language is the code that is used to build webpages and which can be interpreted by a web browser to construct a web page as you see it.
HTTP
HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP) is the protocol that forms the basis of the World Wide Web as we know it today. This provides the ability for documents to be linked by hyperlinks (now more commonly just called links) and was invented at CERN by Tim Berners-Lee in 1989.
HTTPS
HyperText Transfer Protocol Secure (HTTPS) is, simply put, the secure version of HTTP. It secures and encrypts all communications between server and browser. This means that even if an eavesdropper intercepts the information in transit they cannot read it.
Hub & Spoke
The Hub & Spoke is a content marketing model designed to help build topical authority. In this model you build “hub” pages which cover a topic at a broad level and then link from these hub pages to multiple “spoke” pages which cover related sub-topics in depth and link back to the ”hub” page.
Very similar to the Pillar and Cluster Page model.
