In widely used CMS WordPress you may notice a drop down list with Paragraph as the first option. When you click this box you will find various formats for your text from Heading 1 to Heading 6. You may be wondering why are there so many headings or you may even be thinking that you only need to use them for emphasising or increasing the size of font but that is not the true purpose of headings. In this post i explain how to use heading tags to full effect.[divider style=”1″]

<h1> What are Heading tags for ?</h1>

Heading tags are not just to beautify your website or change the size of your font on a webpage ( actually that isn’t what you should use it for), header tags initial purpose has two meanings. One was to emphasis to readers what each section of the website content is about so they can skim over the page easily and find relevant information and the second reason was to create different importance of headings from <h1> all the way to <h6>…that was the initial reason for the <h> tag.

<h2>Find where your heading tag is at</h2>

As things progressed in the world of html and search engines, headings formed an integral part of the SEO strategy.

Including keywords you want to target in your heading tags will increase the search ranking power of the page to get ranked higher with major search engines.

Now when I say this don’t go writing all your content in headings, the bots will know you are cheating, no <p> paragraph </p> content is bad. That is like creating a title of a page and leaving the rest blank, not good, so you can see why it would be bad for your SEO.

Headings help robots to decipher what the content is about and how relevant it is for certain keywords; so, be clever with your heading tags that you choose to use and remember that they are to categorize your content AND NEVER to make your content pretty.

<h3>Search engine please search for my heading tags</h3>

You are pretty much guaranteed that Google’s search engine bots will look at your heading tags for identifying keywords and clues to the content of the webpage you have created. If you don’t include your chosen keyword in your heading tags you are loosing content value! I have warned you.

<h5>I’m the only heading tag in the village!</h5>

Everyone has a wanting to be unique and stand out and guess what? Webpages are no different! If you use a heading tag like <h1>unique</h1> you must NEVER use <h1>unique</h1> EVER AGAIN ON THAT PAGE as search engines love fresh content like we love fresh coconuts.

<h5>Im also the only <h1>heading tag</h1> only one in the country!</h5>

Another words only use <h1>unique title</h1> tag ONCE  to a page. I repeat ONLY USE <h1>unique title</h1> tag ONCE to a webpage. Do your up most to never use the same heading tag on another page or blog post. Standard.

<h6>Control how your heading tags look</h6>

If you want to change how each heading tag looks in a consistent fashion throughout your website you can create what is called a CSS style sheet to specify the font, the size, the color & other special attributes. You can read more about CSS Styling here.

<h6> Oi! Heading tags ! Get in line! </h6>

Heading tags are not given numbers just for the sake of it, it is usually good practice to make sure they follow order. <h1> at the top , followed by sub headings with <h2> then <h3> and so on, decreasing in value as they get smaller.

<h1> is the big statement ( other than your title tag ) so pay careful attention to including your particular keyword in that area clearly so the robots can find it.

Note : All headings below <h1> are for subtitles/ subcategories.

<h6>Not everyone uses heading tags properly</h6>

Just visit a few websites and look for heading tags, you may notice few use heading tags as effectively as they could be. Heading tags aren’t really given the importance or consideration that they should by a lot of designers..even on my own posts I only tend to use <h1> and <h2> but after researching and studying the use of heading tags I will consistently be using the correct structures that search engines and users expect.

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So remember, don’t just <p>talk the talk</p> put <h1> thought into</h1> your content and <h3>make heading tags work for you</h3>