Header Tags - Are You Using Them Correctly?

What Are Header Tags?

Header tags are designed to help structure your posts and blogs according to SEO and search engine ranking, with header tags used to separate headings and subheadings from the main body of content in your post.

Header tags not only help to improve readability - they also let search engine bots know what each section of your content is about and present another opportunity to inject some well-chosen keywords into the structure of your piece.

These do not necessarily follow each other down the page in numerical order - in fact, the numbers dictate the hierarchical importance of the heading rather than its location on the page.

H1 - key heading of the entire blog or piece of content

H2 - subheading to break up your content into smaller chunks

H3 - subsections listed in a specific chunk of content

H4 - items under that list

The Importance Of Header Tags

Your H1 tag is not just there to make the font bigger and bolder - it is also there to present the title of your piece of content, and to let users and google know exactly what the following content is going to be about.

H1 should only be used once in your piece as the title, while you can implement as many of the other header tags into your content as you want to - provided that they support the layout and complexity of your content and make the piece more readable.

And that’s not all. Header tags are also important when it comes to your SEO strategy, presenting you with somewhere to boost your keyword use and communicate the most important ideas and themes of your piece into the headers which users will look at to ascertain the relevance of a piece of content or a block of copy on your website.  

Other benefits and important points to note about header tags include:

• Header tags can often be used online as navigation tools, with a contents at the start of an article or blog outlining each of the sections through their header tags and enabling users to click on each heading to redirect them automatically to that piece of the content. This improves accessibility and supports readers who prefer to sift through content and just find the bits that they are interested in.

• They give text a structure that makes copywriting easier for you and your team. When you break text or copy down into smaller segments, it becomes easier to write and stay on track.

How To Use Header Tags Correctly

To indicate a header starting and ending, we use < > symbols. These work as follows:

< h1 >Enter Heading Here< /h1 >

The inverted slash at the end indicates the end of H1, so that when your copy is entered into the backend of your website, the platform knows to convert the text between the two symbols into an automatic header.

This same format applies to every following header tag, regardless of its status or hierarchy in the copy. Just make sure you get the right number according to your content plan.

When it comes to deciding exactly how many headers to put into your text, we recommend having no more than a couple of 100 words under each header. The more you break up your text, the more accessible it becomes to readers and the more likely you are to reduce that bounce rate which lets Google and other search engines know whether your site is of value or not.

Imagine for a moment that you land on a webpage full of copy with no clear headings, and that you have to sift through hundreds of words to find out what the text is really all about. Your user experience will likely be low in the ranking, and you won’t return to that website.

The goal as a web designer and copywriter is to use headers to break content up into small, manageable chunks.

Tips For Using Header Tags On Your Website Today

If you already have a ton of content on your website and haven’t been using header tags correctly, it’s not too late to get it sorted. If you’re using WordPress or a similar website build platform, the backend editor of your site will allow you to add tags and select the type of heading you want to input at different stages of your text. This may require a reworking of the text to create clear and logical blocks of copy, or you can simply add header tags to existing content.

To make your content clear, it is also worth creating a series of interpretations of your keywords, that you can use in and throughout your header tags. If, for example, your keyword is ‘ecommerce site’, you could use this exact keyword phrase in your main heading and then use it in various forms throughout the rest of the heading tags to keep your content focussed and clear to the reader.

And Finally…

While the heading tags are not always presented in chronological order, you should approach tagging with some logic - avoiding presenting H4 tags directly under H2 tags and vice versa.