SEO Best Practices: How To Use Header Tags On Your Website

Improving the on page SEO score of your website is important because search engines puts a certain weight on how properly organized a webpage is. Your content has to be good but then, it should also look neat and feel good to the eyes. You can't expect a good user experience on a page which has all the words piled one after another, without any headings or section break.Using header tags, you can tell users and search engines about the different sections of content and what a particular section is all about. It is important to note that you want to get ranked for the long tail of search and header tags play a very important role, when you are considering ranking for varied keywords on a subject.

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What are header tags?

In Hyper Text Markup Language (HTML), which is the language used to display webpages in a browser (regardless of the CMS platform), there are various tags that can be used to create headings in a document.
It’s very similar to creating headings in Microsoft Word. When you want a particular text or sentence to stand out, you can set its style to be heading 1, heading 2 etc. If you see the HTML code of your post then you would find something like below-
<h1>Post title</h1>
<h2>Main heading </h2>
<h3>Sub heading</h2>

There are basically 6 types of header tags –

<h1>This is heading 1</h1>
<h2>This is heading 2</h2>
<h3>This is heading 3</h3>
<h4>This is heading 4</h4>
<h5>This is heading 5</h5>
<h6>This is heading 6</h6>

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Why Heading Tags are needed?

Imagine having to find information in a block of text with nothing pointing towards the main point. Here is where heading tags come into play, providing structure on a web page and guiding users who are reading your content. These tags also help search engines, like Google, understand what the content is about and what the most relevant information on a page is. Heading tags are denoted with a lower case “h”, giving the text a format that differentiates them from the rest.

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Role of Header Tags in Search Engine Optimization

If you’re not aware then I must tell you that using your target keyword (the keyword for which you want your post to appear on Google first page, also known as Focus or main keyword) in Header tags will improve the Search engine visibility for your target keyword. For example if you are writing a post on Cars and want your post to appear on first page for keyword “Car” then you should use term or keyword “Car” in your header tags.

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Usability for Mobile Devices

As we move forward into the world of voice search, headers are becoming even more important. When someone uses a mobile device to search online, Google will scan website pages paying particular attention to headers. If the headers match what the person is searching for, it will deliver the content. This means that if your page doesn’t have any headers, there’s a good chance the device will not pick up that it is relevant to the search. This leads to lost opportunities for improving your SEO.

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How to use the Heading Tags

While your header tags do extend to h4, h5 and h6, focus only on the first three since these are the tags that carry the most SEO value. Header tags have their own place on a page and have to be used in a proper order starting with your h1.
The h1 tag should contain your targeted keywords, ones that closely relate to the page title and are relevant to your content. The h2 tag is a subheading and should contain similar keywords to your h1 tag. Your h3 is then a subheading for your h2 and so on. Think of them as a hierarchy based on importance, the above being more important than the below.
Keep in mind that it’s also very import that your header tags are readable and grammatically correct. Stuffing your h1, h2 and h3 with keywords is not going to help your cause. If anything, Google will recognize this and assume you are trying to manipulate them — that’s a no-no!

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Heading tags: Do's and Dont's

• Do use h1 for your page’s title and include a relevant keyword whenever it is possible.
• Do use heading tags wisely. You should make the most of it and include keywords that will help your page rank better among search engines search results.
• Do place h tags where it makes sense. If you have too few, they won´t help the reader scan the text; if you have too many, they can have the opposite effect and make the text more difficult to scan.
• Don´t place a heading tag in a text that would not help define the page’s structure.
• Don’t change tag sizes unpredictably. Never place an h2 before an h1 or an h1 in the middle of the text.

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To Conclude

Getting page headings correct is crucial to your overall SEO plan and with the right headings and structure you can attract traffic and appear higher in search rankings. These important on-page elements should be practiced site-wide. Do an audit of your site and see if there are pages that are missing headers and add them. If you’re looking for a company to help you get to the top of the search engine rankings, Give SEO Ninja Softwares a try! With more than 5000+ satisfied clients and over 2000+ raving fans, our search engine optimization skills have been proven to help businesses just like yours find success online. We offer Premium Local SEO, E-Commerce SEO, and global SEO from startups to Corporate businesses. Our pricing is reasonable, high-retentionable and offer #1 Ranking on Google. Feel free for any queries or questions you may have to our 24/7 customer support. So if you don’t see results, we’ll give you your money back. We’d be happy to answer any questions you may have about our SEO pricing plans or any other queries, or the methods we use to improve your site’s visibility in search engines such as Google. Feel free to contact us at any time!