Heading Tag Structure and SEO
The structure of your website is very important for maintaining good search engine positions. Headings are quite possibly one of the most important elements in maintaining a good structure to your web pages, they can convey meaning and represent the base on which the rest of your copy sits.
Headings are helpful to all of your visitors. Your human visitors will be grateful for the use of headings as headings help break up the text, making it easier to ‘skim read’. If your visitors also use screen reading equipment then they will find well-structured headings even more useful as headings can be tabbed between giving blind or partially sighted visitors the opportunity to ‘skim read’ just like everyone else. Your robotic friends, the search engine spiders, also rely on good html structure, and headings offer them a real clue as to what your page is all about.
Heading Tag Ordering
The order in which you place your heading tags is very important to maintaining a suitable, usable structure to your web pages. The first thing to remember is to place your heading tags in descending order, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6. The h1 being the most important heading on your page, should be closely related to your page title, and contain your most important keywords. There should only ever be one h1 on each page. The rest of the heading tags are subheadings, and should be treated as such, being thematically linked to the headings above and support the main, h1.
You don’t have to order your headings in h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6 all the time. This may seem like a contradiction to what I said above, and I suppose it is a bit, but let me explain with diagrams:
So you can have an h3 under an h2, then you can go back to another h2, then place another h3 underneath it. What you must never do is skip headings. By this I mean, h1, h3, h2 – this isn’t logical.
Heading Tag Content
In the paragraph above I touched on the fact that your heading tags should contain your keywords. If you have planned your SEO campaign well, then your keywords should naturally fit into your web pages without too much ‘shoe-horning’ – in fact I’d go so far as to say that if you can’t get your keywords to work naturally then you should go back to the planning stage and work out a better list of keywords because you’ve probably chosen the wrong ones.
I would like to take this opportunity to tell you not to stuff your headings with keywords. Keyword stuffing doesn’t make much sense to your human visitors, so in my opinion is a pretty useless exercise, especially when your think of the search engines’ goal – to provide a list of useful websites for the search query. Instead, you should make sure your heading tags are grammatically correct, read well, and entice your readers to read the paragraph they head up.
Heading Tags Summarised
- Every page within your site should have at least one heading
- You should only ever put one h1 on a page
- Make sure your h1 is the first heading on the page
- Your h1 should contain your main keyword and be similar but not the same as the page title
- Style your headings with CSS, not inline styles
- Never skip heading levels. It isn’t logical to skip from h2 to h4. However, you can go from h2 to h3, then back to h2 if your content warrants this
- You can use more than one h2, h3, h4, h5, and h6 on your page
- All headings apart from h1 are subheadings
- You should use your headings consistently throughout your website
- Headings should be grammatically correct, logical and easy to scan
- Put your keywords in if you can, if you can’t then go back to the drawing board…
- Your headings should be closely related to your text
If structuring your headings was all you did to your website then you would be doing yourself a massive favour! I’ve seen sites shoot up the listings just by incorporating changes to the headings. If you have any questions or comments about headings then don’t be shy – comment!
Related posts:
- SEO Video Blog - Headings #27 Script: News - This weeks news feature is the sneaky peak at Google’s new search layout. We think that the new layout will possible be released along side the caffeine algorithm update in the new year, to create a bit of publicity. Its pretty simple and we’ll show you...
- Correct Keyword Placement A key aspect of proper SEO is keyword placement. It is important to remember it isn’t just about the quantity of keywords. In fact, you can get penalised if you over-do the keywords. It can also look unnatural for the reader, and you must make your reader feel as though...
- SEO – Ensure You’re At The Top Of The Search Engines This Time Next Year Plan Ahead To Get The SEO Results You Want No-one knows what will happen next year with the current economic climate, but one thing we can be certain of is that your business is more likely to succeed if you are exposed online via SEO. Whether you are currently sitting...
- Internal Optimisation the fast way to get indexed There are many ways to speed up the process of getting a fresh domain indexed by your favourite search engine. The aim for all search engines is to present the most relevant documents for the search phrase. The first thing to remember is that your site should follow all relevant...
- SEO vs Usability - Search Engine Optimisation Tutorial Script: Nick - Welcome to our SEO Video Blog, This week I am joined by my colleague Amelia while James is on holiday and today we are going to discuss SEO vs Usability. Amelia has experience in this field so it will be good to get her input. Amelia...
