Heading tags and their importance on your site

Heading tags are used to differentiate the headings of a page from your content. This makes your work more easily read by both your audience and search engines crawlers. They are part of the HTML code of a site.

There are six distinct heading tags that begin at <h1> and go through to <h6>; headings denote a section heading, but the number of the heading tag also refers to the importance of a section.

The <h1> tag is considered to be more significant for your page and users, while the tag <h6> is considered the least significant. These tags are in hierarchical order, and distribute the weight of importance for keywords.

Head tags help crawlers and website visitors

Headings not only make your page look cleaner, and they tell the search engine crawlers what your content is about via the keywords used.

Search engines need help better understanding what your document is about to be able to index your page properly. Since there is a hierarchical structure, search engines can put even more weight on certain keywords found at different parts of the hierarchy.

Furthermore, it indicates which sub-categories you’re also covering on the page. It is recommended to break your content up every 200 words with sub-headings. Not only will it help the search engines know which keywords to put weight on, but it will also help users, as they tend to scan more than read in-depth.

Heading tags help break up your content and bring structure to it by signalling relevancy and hierarchy. This helps both search engine crawlers and visitors quickly and accurately process the information.

Setting Up Heading Tags on Your Site 

There are different levels of heading tags, they begin at level <h1> and then it goes to <h2>, <h3>, all the way down to <h6>. Heading tags have a hierarchical structure. You must go in order from <h1> to <h2> to <h3>... to <h6>. If you jump from <h1> to <h3>, skipping <h2>, you break the hierarchy and that is not considered to be SEO friendly.

Below you can find the correct structure of heading tags:

<h1>Main Heading</h1>
   <h2>Secondary Heading 1</h2>
     <h3>Sub-section of the secondary heading 1</h3>
   <h2>Secondary Heading 2</h2>
     <h3>Sub-section of the secondary heading 2</h3>

Using that HTML from above, it will appear on the page like this: