Tutorials Blog: Heading tag writing tips

Importance of Heading

Heading is the most important part of a web page. A heading gives a clear idea to visitors as well as search bots. A good heading describes briefly what a web page is all about. We can use 6 types of heading in a page.

For different heading, different HTML heading tag is used. Proper use of heading tags helps in better SERP result. As a result, your visitors will increase. On the other hand, wrong use of heading may cause harm to your site. Many new webmasters are not aware of heading. They often do wrong with heading. I shall be giving a clear idea on using heading tag.

Heading tag writing tips:

Always avoid this point when writing heading tag-

1. Placing text in heading tags that wouldn't be helpful in defining the structure of the page

2. Using heading tags where other tags like <em> and <strong> may be more appropriate

3. Erratically moving from one heading tag size to another

4. Excessively using heading tags throughout the page

5. Putting all of the page's text into a heading tag

6. Using heading tags only for styling text and not presenting structure

How to Use Heading Tags

You may know that in a web page we can use 6 Headings in a single page. There should be only one heading 1 (H1) in a page which describes all about the page. H2, H3 and H4 are used for sub-section of H1. But many developers and SEO experts say more H1 tags can be used in certain pages and if the topics are different. Usually headings should be used in the following way:

Heading 1 (H1) [ the main topic- describes briefly about the page]

Heading 2 (H2) [ section]

Heading 3 (H3) [Sub-section]

Heading (H4)

Heading 2 (H2) [ section]

Heading 3 (H3) [Sub-section]

Heading (H4)

Here I didn't mention about H5 and H6. These headings should be used for less important things such as Date header, Sidebar Title etc. But many new bloggers are not aware of using header properly. For better optimization we must optimize heading tag properly.

Heading Tags in Blogger Blog

Here I am going to talk about Blogspot blogs. In Blogspot Blogs Heading tags are not properly used in default as they should be. See how heading tags are used in Blogger templates.

Heading 1 Blog’s Name/Title /Company Name

Heading 2 Date Header/Sidebar Header/Footer Header

Heading 3 Post Title/Page title

Heading 4 Sub heading

Heading 5 Minor heading

Blogger uses H1 for Blog’s name that is fine. In homepage, Blog Title/Blog Name can be H1 but in post page, post title should be H1. Now about heading 2, H2 for date header or sidebar header is not correct for SEO because they are not so important. Heading 2 should be used for second most important thing which is Post Title. For better SEO result, you must optimize your heading properly.

How should we change heading?

We should change heading tags in following way:

Blog Name/Title/Company Name: H1 (in Home page)

H2 (in Post pages)

Post Title: H2 (in Home page)

H1 (in Post pages)

Date Header/Sidebar Header: H4

H1, H2, H3 Headings:

We use Thesis post styling feature to style blog post which is good but we can’t ignore one of the important aspect of SEO and that’s using proper H1, H2, H3 heading. By default in any SEO optimized theme, post title is H1 tags. So for next sub heading you can use H2 heading, and H3 heading and so on.

Specially when you writing a long post, it’s always a good idea to use proper heading tags for effective SEO. You can refer to following posts for better understanding of how to use headings within blog posts.< Link1> <Link 2>

According to SEO community, it’s a good idea to use your Keyword in H1, H2, H3 Tags.

Quick Checklist:

Post title for readers & search engine (Keyword in H1, H2, H3 and Post title)

Post Permalink (Stop words free and Keywords in Permalink)

Interlinking within post with Anchor text

Image Alt text (Keyword)

Post meta description (Optimize it for better CTR and use your target keyword once)

Post Meta keywords (Could be ignored)

Link to on external high MOZrank source.

Being a human being we tend to make mistakes, but we can always learn from our mistakes and errors and try to write quality but also SEO optimized articles.

Add h4 and h5 Tags

What do we read and give importance first when we read a Newspaper? Of course the Headlines! Similar logic does apply to Headlines that appear in our posts. Readers and Robots attraction is greatly drawn by the HTML Heading tags. Heading Tags have more importance then a normal plain text. The largest size and most important Heading tag is the H1 tag and this tag by default is added to your Blog Homepage title in Blogger, next comes H2 which is added to Blog Description and the H3 which is added to Blog Post titles and what is left are H4 and H5 tags. So you must make use of this golden opportunity. The Blue headline text that you always see in my posts are the H4 tags and the green ones are the H5 tags in descending order of importance. As shown below,
Advantages:

These tags will highlight important sections to robots and Readers

Again an edge over your Competitors!

More chances to get better indexed!

In order to know how to customize the HTML Heading tags in your blogs I am sure you would love reading

Change your Post title Heading Tag

By default, all blogger templates use H1 for homepage title, H2 for blog description and H3 to post titles. Due to the fact that the post titles are the second most important part of your blog after the main title, you should assign them an H2 instead of H3.

Go to Template | Edit HTML

Search for .post h3 and replace all the occurrences of it with .post h2.

Next search for,

Replace it with the below code

Save template.

Custom Robots Header Tags

These robots tags will go in the header section of your blog. You can use these settings to disable indexing of archive and search pages in search results. Go to Settings > Search Preferences > ‘Enable custom robots header tags?’ under the ‘Crawlers and indexing’

Joomla header tag:

Headings

You have control of your template’s headers, styles, and formatting in the Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) file usually found under /template-name/css/template.css. Articles in Joomla should always have a title. This title should be assigned style “Heading 1” (H1) and it should contain keywords.

Many Joomla templates use the Heading 1 for the website title and add a Heading 2 to the article title. To maximize your on-page SEO, you should change this:

You can change it manually on the template on the php file.

You can get an extension to do this.

You can hide the article (page) title from the “Article Options” (on the side) then add the title manually on the WYSIWYG and apply the Header 1 style with the drop down menu.

Always Use “H1″ Tag for Title:

If you use H1 tag in your title then search engines will easily find out the subject of the post that is why it is recommended to use main keyword in the title because it will help your visitor as well as search engine to understand the topic by the title itself. Some Joomla templates contains H1 tags in the title by default but not all sites have it. You can find many Joomla sites which doesn’t contain H1 tag in the title.

Titles as H1: Make sure your page titles are all marked as H1's. This is done with most templates in Joomla right out of the box, however, not all of them. I've also see a few some Joomla websites that have been modified where the titles no longer have H1's in them. The H1 tag is used by Google's algorithm to easily detect the subject of the page (along with page title).

There are almost countless other things you can do to help improve both your on-site and off-site SEO on your Joomla website. We've covered just a few of the less commonly talked about ones. If you have specific questions on SEO, you can comment below or post in the Q&A forum on our website.

Header tag text style:

Bold: You can bold (e.g. [strong]) certain words which are of high importance. Sometimes it’s good to bold your keywords where appropriate. However overdoing this may get you penalized.

Italic: You can use the [em] tag to emphasize certain words which will appear in italic.

Quote: This is very useful when you are quoting from someone.

HTML Headings

Headings are important in HTML documents. A heading in HTML is just what you might expect, a title or subtitle. By placing text inside of <h1> (heading) tags, the text displays bold and the size of the text depends on the number of heading (1-6). Headings are numbered 1-6, with 1 being the largest heading and 6 being the smallest.

Headings are defined with the <h1> to <h6> tags.

<h1> defines the most important heading. <h6> defines the least important heading.

Example

<body>

<h1>This is heading one</h1>

<h2>This is heading two</h2>

<h3>This is heading three</h3>

<h4>This is heading four</h4>

<h5>This is heading five</h5>

<h6>This is heading six</h6>

</body>

Place these lines into your HTML file and you should get what is displayed below.

Headings 1-6 Result

Note: Browsers automatically add some empty space (a margin) before and after each heading. Notice that each heading has a line break before and after each heading display. This is a built in attribute so to speak associated with the heading tag. Each time you place a heading tag, your web browser automatically places a line break in front of your beginning tag and after your ending tag exactly the same as with <p> tags.

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SEO

Tuesday, 3 February 2015

Heading tag writing tips