Use Proper Heading Tags To Improve Your Site SEO
Heading tags are a very important element in creating and maintaining a search engine friendly web site or blog. In this some what short but descriptive article, I am going to explain to you what heading tags are and how they can be used on your website for improving your site SEO.
A heading tag defines headers. A header is used to mark sections on your blog or web site. There are six header levels. These levels are as follows: H1, H2, H3, H4, H5, H6. The H1 header tag is the largest font size and H6 is the smallest.
Search engines look for header tags because they are beacons for finding content as well as pathways on your blog or web site. The three most commonly used header tags are: H1, H2, and H3. Sometimes, H4 is used, but not too often. H5 and H6 are rarely used.
Here is an example of how I use Header tags on my blogs.
In the source code of my blogs, the H1 tag is the link to my home page. The H2 tags represent my categories, and H3 represent my post and page titles. From there, my WordPress Tags are made as STRONG, or otherwise called BOLD. Excuse my lack of being an artist, but here is a screen shot:
The home page of my blog feeds H2 links to my category sections. From there, my category sections feed h3 links to my blog posts. My blog post then feed BOLD links into my tags. Electricity always takes the path of least resistance. With search engine optimization, web crawlers follow the same rules. Web web site building, or in my case, blog building, I paved the path for web crawlers. I build the path of least resistance.
On the home page of my blogs, as you know, H2 links feed to my category pages. However, as you know, my most recent blogs posts still appear on my home page. These will remain H3 links. When web crawlers see this, they place emphisis on my category sections to find the content.
That is one of the reasons why I believe that I can pump out so much content and have it all index so quickly. Granted, nothing I say or do is proven. That is where many SEOs differ. I am just telling you precisely what I do and it works.
When you build these pathways for web crawlers, really in many ways you are building multiple HomePages to your site or blog. In fact, there are many situations where a category section of one of my blogs has more PageRank and power than its own home page and the same goes with a tag section too.
If I have a blog that has three categories: Dogs, Cats and Humans. And I write a post about Dogs. It is very likely that that post will get indexed because the crawler found it on the category section rather than the home page.
Using proper heading tags to shape and mold how I want web crawlers to perceive my sections of my blog is very important. Of course, getting an sitemap xml on your blog is extermely helpful too. Everything in SEO compliments each other. In order to have a site optimized for search engines, you should understand that there isn’t just ONE SUPER HUGE thing you need to do. Instead, there are many smaller things to do that add up towards the big picture of doing SEO on a site.
What did I miss? How else can you better optimize your web site or blog for search engines? Drop me a comment and share your thoughts.
November 5th, 2008 at 1:30 am
Thanks for sharing. Search engine optimization is indeed one of the most crucial areas in Internet marketing, it is a perfect bridge between technology and business.
November 5th, 2008 at 6:40 am
Yep yep
The importance of using good keywords in heads and sub heads can not be overstated.
November 5th, 2008 at 2:29 pm
I am a bit confused – If you wrap your site title in h1 tags wont that duplicate the lead header across every page?
doesn’t this become a “duplicate content” problem?
Or does having the different h2s and h3s eliminate this problem?
thanks
Jon
November 5th, 2008 at 9:26 pm
That’s a cool concept – using header tags to set priority on blog pages. I’ve long been frustrated with the inability to prioritize what’s important on a blog. I’ve been using sitemap priorities to get the SE’s to focus on the categories, but this sounds like an additional method.
A happy customer
November 6th, 2008 at 8:39 am
Gary;
One concept that we have developed for our clients is the use of a static text block on the Home/ Index page of the blog to facilitate SEO function. By only appearing on the one page we avoid duplicate content issues and the page appears less like an orphaned page should the blog topic and post be less than perfectly SEO-ed.
I’ll take your comments off the air.
November 6th, 2008 at 11:50 pm
“Thanks for sharing. Search engine optimization is indeed one of the most crucial areas in Internet marketing, it is a perfect bridge between technology and business.”
FYI Palapple is a canned spam comment
November 12th, 2008 at 12:16 pm
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December 29th, 2008 at 3:26 am
thaks for the good info on headings.
Here I must want to know about the Numbers. Means how many times I can use H1, H2, H3 and others on a web page.
Its really must to know for my SEO
January 16th, 2009 at 7:03 pm
Thanks for such good post on header tags which play a very important role in SEO. Search engines give more importance to text within header tags than they do to normal sized text.
Peter Lee
February 27th, 2009 at 1:03 pm
[...] post is all about and if’s interesting enough to read more. Here is a post I came across on the use of headers, which shows just how much you may be missing if you don’t use headers. As an added SEO [...]
March 8th, 2009 at 12:45 am
[...] post is all about and if it’s interesting enough to read more. Here is a post I came across on the use of headers, which shows just how much you may be missing if you don’t use headers. As an added SEO [...]
June 23rd, 2009 at 2:00 am
[...] 50. Use H1 tags [...]