Improve user experience
User experience is very important, and every business should do their best to improve it, if possible. But, one more reason why website owners should focus on user experience is that they’re not the only ones who care about this. Search engines care about the user experience. Basically, this means that if a search engine “believes” that users enjoy your website, the search engine will support your SEO strategy. So, if a website owners care about SEO and user experience, there’s no reason not to improve both.
Structure your content
It’s obvious that content with headings and subheadings is much easier to read than content without them. Just imagine someone reading endless lines of text, not knowing where to look for the information they need to find. And this is not only the case with the page but with the website as a whole. To give some structure to the content of your website, you can use other elements, such as categories, tags, and even subcategories. As you can see, it’s important that your content is structured.
Information is easier to access
Remember that some people can’t read easily, so heading and subheading make information easier for them to access. The HTML allows a screen reader to recognize the tags and helps it read it aloud to a person using this assistance. Also, what makes it even easier is that the screen reader makes shortcuts by helping the users skip from one header to another.
Heading and subheading contain keywords
When we’re talking about Search Engine Optimization, the text is of course, important. However, headings and subheadings are even more important for SEO. And that’s exactly why at least one of your higher-level headings should contain your keyword. Simply said, by doing this, you’re letting readers and search engines know what the topic of your webpage is. And then, the search engine will decide how to rank your webpage, while readers decide if they wish to read it.
How to use header tags?
Some websites don’t really use h1 and h2 headings, but that is not very smart, considering the SEO aspect of it. If people knew how and why they’re important, they would probably optimize their page using these tags.
Header 1 text
Looking at the page, the header 1 text should easy to notice, as it’s the largest. And mostly, the header 1 text is the title of the page, and it contains the keyword. Even if it’s not the exact title, it should contain the keywords and be closely related to the title, as this lets people know what they’re going to read about.
Header 2 text
Header 2 text is a subheading and should also contain the keyword, just like the header 1 text. However, subheading should lead the readers to a more specific part of your content. This is where you should go in deeper on the subject and explain more closely what you’re going to talk about.
Be careful with headings and subheadings
They should not be used without any order. Higher-level subheadings are more important and more general, while subheading for a certain paragraph explores the topic of a certain paragraph in greater detail.
Higher-level headings and subheadings affect SEO the most
You can make text bigger without these tags, but that’s not a good thing to do. First of all, you should know there’s more to these tags than that. As you know heading and subheading affect SEO, but h1 and h2 text, and perhaps h3 are most important. They should contain keywords because SEO gives more weight to higher-level subheadings. However, when including your keyword, you should do this naturally and grammatically correct. And keep in mind that if you don’t implement key phrases naturally, the search engine might recognize that you’re simply stuffing higher-level subheading with keywords.
Example
Let’s see what the text between the tags should be for each tag:
- The h1 heading should represent what’s most important, usually, it’s the title of the page
- The h2 heading is related to the title, and it should also include the keywords
- The h3 are subheadings to h2 and is the lowest-level subheading with keywords,
- As already mentioned, h1, h2, and h3 headings and subheadings affect SEO most, which is not the case with lower-level subheadings
- The h4, h5, h6 are the lowest level subheadings
Basically, every lower-level subheading should reinforce its heading, going all the way up the topic of the text.
Why headings and subheadings affect SEO?
You hopefully understand now how headings and subheadings affect SEO, but you might still not understand why. The reason why headings and subheadings are a key component to SEO is that search engines use them to see what your page is about. And of course, headings should reflect the topic of the text, and that’s why search engines give them more weight. Of course, you’ll use short-tail and long-tail keywords naturally and use this to your advantage. So, if your pages don’t utilize headings and subheadings in the best possible way, you might want to consider changing it.