SEO Tips: Effective HEADING tags. <h1> <h2> <h3> – Where Should We Use Them?
What are Heading tags?
Heading tags are HTML tags used to create titles and subtitles within your content. They also tell your web-browser what to emphasize (make bigger) and are important to tell search engines what your content is about.
They are in order of importance from <h1> (most important) to <h6> (least important).
Heading Tag Examples.
Heading 1 (<h1>)
Heading 2 (<h2>)
Heading 3 (<h3>)
Heading 4 (<h4>)
Heading 5 (<h5>)
Heading 6 (<h6>)
How does it affect Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)?
Think about writing a reasonably long document in a text editor e.g. Word, you would have the:
- Title of the document surmising what the document was about – this would be the <h1> tag
- Subtitles, outlining the broad sections – these would be your <h2> tags
- Section titles, describing more specific content (sub-subtitles) – these would be your <h3> tags
- Sub-section titles, describing even more specific content (sub-sub-subtitles) – these would be your <h4> tags
You can continue down all the way to <h6>, but more often then not you won’t have enough sub-subsections to want to ‘dig’ that deep (I’ve yet to go past <h4>).
Note that when you are writing a printed/Word document you generally only have ONE title – this is true of a webpage as well – generally you only have one <h1> tag for the page title and that’s it. Generally speaking (again, just like a printed document) you will have less subtitles (<h2>) than section titles (<h3>), and less section titles than subsection (<h4>) titles.
Creating Effective titles
If you are concerned about SEO, then you will want your headings to be as descriptive… within reason. Take this post’s title as an example:
“SEO Tips: Effective HEADING tags. <h1><h2> <h3> – Where Should We Use Them?”
This would have been too short:
“Heading Tags”
This Would have been too long:
“SEO Tips: Effective HEADING tags. <h1><h2> <h3> <h4> <h5> <h6> – Where Should We Use Them? How Does it Affect SEO? Creating Effective title and Example of Usage”
Having a title which is too short, whilst it may look nice is (in terms of SEO) a waste – Search engines such as Google pay special attention to your page’s <h1> tag and how much it relates to your content – remember SEO rule number one: if you don’t write it, Google can’t find it!
Having a title which is too long will not benefit your SEO, as search engines could well ‘mark you down’ for keyword cramming and you will end up on a the search results page further down then you otherwise would have. Also, I suspect search engines ignore tags which go beyond a certain amount of characters. Don’t forget that humans actually have to read your content, not just ‘Google-bots’ – if you have a long title this could put ‘real’ people off. People may think that such long titles could be a tell-tale sign of a spammy web site, thus ruining all that hard work you’ve spend on SEO in the first place.
Finally, your title, just like in a printed document, your headings should reflect and surmise your content. If appropriate, include your keywords in your title content.
Should I Enclose the Page’s Title or my Company Name/Logo Within the <h1> tag?
The long and short of it is: this depends (*sigh*).
If you have a shopping cart or blog site where the name of the product or title of the page is the most important term (i.e. you want to be found by that) then I suggest you wrap this in the <h1> tag as you want to be found by these words through search engines.
However, if you have a portfolio site where your company/personal name is important and you want to increase your chances that this appears first in search engines, then you may want to wrap this in the <h1> tag and make the titles for each page <h2>.
It all depends what you want to emphasise. Just think about how you want to be found in search engines such as Google.
How to Create Headings
Unfortunately, teaching the fellow reader HTML is out of the scope of this article, but if you have a CMS or are already familiar with HTML you create headings like so:
<h1>(enter your title text in here)</h1>
<h2>(enter your subtitle text in here)</h2>
A typical page would look like this:
<h1> Title</h1>
Intro Text
<h2>Subtitle</h2>
<h3>Section Title</h3>
Content Text
<h3>Section Title</h3>
Content Text
<h3>Section Title</h3>
Content Text
<h3>Section Title</h3>
Content Text
<h2>Subtitle</h2>
<h3>Section Title</h3>
Content Text
<h3>Section Title</h3>
Content Text
<h3>Section Title</h3>
Content Text
<h3>Section Title</h3>
Content Text
etc etc
