What website owners need to know about headings

Headings are a crucial part of any article. Not only do they help readers to navigate your content and read it more easily, headings also allow Google to better understand hat your article is about.

But using headings correctly can be a little more tricky than it first seems. Here’s what every website owner needs to know about using them correctly.

What’s the point of headings in the first place?

You’ll want to include headings in your content for a number of reasons.

They add structure to your text

You can use headings to aff structure to your article and guide readers through the content. When they are reading online, people don’t tend to read every article in full. Instead, they skip ahead to bits that catch their interest. This is very hard to do without headings. So most users won’t even attempt to read a piece without headings. Instead, they’ll leave your website and go to a competitor.

They improve accessibility

Headings can be used to make your text more accessible even for people who can’t read well from a screen. That’s because they are picked up by screen readers that will read headings allowed before reading the related content. If visually impaired readers don’t want to read that section, they can skip forward until they find a heading they like.

To improve your article’s ranking

Headings can also improve your article’s ranking in Google. That’s because they are a great way to include your targeted keywords in your content and because Google specifically uses them as a ranking factor. They can also increase the amount of time that readers spend on your site, which is another ranking factor.

How to use headings the right way

If you want to use headings effectively, you’ll want to take care house you use them. There are certain rules that you’ll need to follow if you want to use them effectively.

The first rule to abide by is that you can only have one H1 tag per page. The good news is that you don’t have to think too hard about which heading that should be as it will almost always be the title of the piece. In this article, for instance, the title is “What website owners need to know about headings”.

Once you have used your H1 tag on the title, you can use as many H2, H3, and H4 tags as you like. Don’t just use them in any order, however. You’ll want to use them sequentially. So an H3 will follow an H2 and an H4 will follow an H3.

If you were to look at the structure of a page, it might look something like this:

H1: Page Title

H2: First Main subheading

H3: Related subheading

H3: Related subheading

H2: Second main subheading

H3: Related subheading

H2: Final Subheading

Use headings in this way and you’ll create awesome pieces of content that are very easy for both humans and Google to read.