SEO, SEO, and SEO we have heard a lot more than we used to.
Well, coronavirus changed our living dynamics, and everyone is now looking for a digital existence. Be it a blog owner or a multiple million-dollar organization; everyone is pursuing to be visible clearly on the Internet.
Building a website is one thing; making it do magic for you is a whole another concept. SEO is not only important for your business and virtual presence; you need to be known.
People use different techniques to improve the SEO and ranking of their websites. Today, I will be explaining to you how to improve heading tags for your website. It is not limited to your business site; these rules can be used in your blog posts as well.
So without any further delay, please allow me to begin today’s article. If you want to learn how to optimize your header tags on your website for SEO, then this is going to be a fantastic read, and you, my friend, are in the right place.
Table of Contents
What are heading tags?
I am sure you have spent a lot of your time preparing Microsoft word documents. And while doing that, you must have used headings. Headings are used to giving a specific look to a certain part of your content. Heading tags are similar to these heading in Microsoft word.
But let’s begin from the start as most people don’t understand that the title tags play a pretty significant role in the search engine optimization and ranking of a certain page or a blog post on a website.
Okay, so, what are these heading/ header tags? When we say header tags or title tags, sometimes they’re called both. We are talking about these headlines/ headings on the page we see while scrolling down the page.
If you are using a WordPress platform to build your website, you get to set up each section of the page. You need to click on the add sign to open up the selection box and choose the heading button. You get to have the following options:
- H1 (This is the first and the highest-ranking heading with pretty big font size)
- H2
- H3
- H4
- H5
- H6 (This is the last and the lowest ranking heading with the smallest font size)
Setting up the heading tags
When setting up the header tags on your website, you can select to assign different headers for different heading titles within your content.
People use different h tags (from the selection box). They can choose from header 1, header 2, header 3, header 4, header 5, and header 6.
All of these headers are important as far as formatting a web page is required. But only the top three are important as they are the only headers that are used in SEO.
These headers can be used to beautify and format the content as per desire. Here, what I mean by beautifying is that h1 is usually the largest font. Then comes the h2, which is the second-largest font. Then h3, which is the third-largest, and the list continues.
So what are these h1s, h2s and h3s? Here is a pictorial explanation for you to understand the terminology easily.
Allow me to walk you through an example for more clarification. Let’s assume that you want a certain section to stand out. You want this section to immediately catch your viewer’s attention as soon as he lands on your webpage.
To do so, you need to use h1, h2, and h3. You can use any of these three headers in any order but remember that h1 should not be used twice, and h1 should be used at the start of the content or page as this is the title header.
People who use h1 more than once in a specific section confuse Google and fail to have a good SEO. As h1 is the largest of the fonts, it is used to make the text larger.
So here is a rule of thumb, in this case, is, and you need to follow it for all your other websites or blog posts; you require only one h1 heading tag, one h2 heading tag, and remaining all the heading tags should be h3. And if you want to add more, then that’s your choice, but they won’t contribute to SEO.
Heading tags on different platforms
I am a WordPress fan, and you may like Wix or some other web development platforms. But heading tags are the same on every platform. They may look like something else, but they exist and operate in the same manner.
Let’s give you a demo of what heading tags look like on different platforms.
I’m in love with WordPress right now; that’s what this platform is that we’re working in but if you’re using a different platform to build your website. Wix or WordPress have their ways using which you can use the header tag. These are all the easy, peasy front-end options.
But there are other platforms as well. In Google Chrome or Firefox and maybe other browsers as well, all you need to do is to right-click anywhere on the page and hit the “Inspect” option. This opens up the code of the page. Here you can click the select element, which highlights different elements of the page.
This inspect element helps you identify/ locate all the H1 heading tags used and by control plus f function, and it will highlight the number of times H1 has been used on your web page or blog post.
Similarly, if you move your mouse over to the next section, you get to see h2 and then h3 heading tags. You can check the count of H2 and H3 heading tags similarly as you did for H1. And then the heading tag continues as you scroll down with the design of the page.
The h2 tag has been used to make this text more prominent, but there are several different ways where you can edit the text and add in the font size.
You can make the text to any size you want with the ease of the reader. And then you can see that makes it a lot bigger. So even if it’s an h3 heading tag, you can just increase the font size and optimize the appearance of the titles.
It’s just one h1 tag, one h2 tag, and then the rest of the headers on the page should be h3 heading tags.
You can use the inspect elements to determine what you have your headline set as currently. Then you can also use the view page source to just command f and search for the h2 tags. It’ll highlight them, and you can see how many h2s there are.
Google recommends using no more than two h2s. So if you have more than three h2 heading tags, you have to change one of them and convert it to h3. There is no restriction on the limit of having h3s, so you can have as many as you want.
Are heading tags still important?
Well, yes, they are if you want Google to look for your content easily. If you have other SEO and ranking schemes, then no. But as far as google and the general user is concerned, they are.
They make your content fancy, and anything which looks easy to read and is well divided into sections is read more by a general user and found easily by Google as well.
Bottom line
There you go – couldn’t have made it easier for you. This is going to be your guide to header tags for a long-lasting time. Hopefully, I have covered enough material in this article to help you with and let you work on your website or blog post with heading tags.
Planning on your web page or blog post doesn’t have to be complicated. Don’t stress, divide the content into similar headings under different heading tags accordingly!!!
