Using Heading Tags Effectively
Nearly every web site has a title and a heading. The heading is usually in the form of an H1 tag although some sites just style a span element which is wrong. Making effective use of your headings is an important on page SEO factor.
When and Where to use Headings
Headings should be used when you start a new section. For example this page is all about how to use heading tags such as H1 and H2 effectively. It can be broken down into sections. First of all I describe the general topic which is Using Heading Tags Effectively, thats in an H1 tag and is my main topic. Then I break this article into several sections each of which use an H2 tag as they are the next level down.
- When and Where to use Headings
- Code Semantics
- Breaking the page up
- Better keyword diversity and weighting
If I was goign to discuss code semantics in more detail, eg which tags to be used and in what order I might chose to devote another sub heading for each particular tag. Seeing as this would be anotehr level I would use an H3 tag for the heading of each individual tag.
Code Semantics
Code Semantics help dictate how a page should be laid out. For example, you don't put the head tag after the body tag because it would not be the correct way around. Further more the tags exist for a reason and in the early days of web building when style was in very short supply it was plainly obvious which tags were being used.
Now though some people style a paragraph tag to look like a heading tag. This is incorrect and loses you the power of the heading tag which is more than a paragraph tag as it helps to describe a section.
Read our Heading Tag SEO Test. The conclusions from this test were that the heading tags had more of an effect than just text in a paragraph. This is what we thought but it was debated so a test was put in place to answer the question.
Breaking the Page up
Headings are also nice to break up a page. Typically they have large margind and are big and bold. This grabs people's attention. Let me guess that you read the heading Breaking the Page up before reading this paragraph. Am I right? Well thats because it grabbed your attention and that is what headings are for.
Better Keyword Diversity and Weighting
By putting additional keywords in headings such as Code Semantics I am targetting a more diverse range of topics and searches. This page is about using headings effectviely. But someone searching for Heading Tag Semantics or H1 Code Semantics might find this page because I put my additional keywords in a heading tag.
The SEO Files Recomends
Use Heading Tags effectively, diversify your keyword range, break up your page and grab people's attention by correctly using heading tags.