Heading is the most important part of a web page, with a headline visitor gives a clear estimate for search bots. A good title briefly describes what the web page is all about. We can use 6 types of titles in one page.
For different titles, different HTML title tags are used. Proper use of title tags helps in better SERP results. As a result, your visitors will increase. On the other hand, incorrect use of title can harm your site. Many new webmasters do not know about the top. They often do wrong with the title, I will give a clear idea on using the heading tag.
Heading tag writing:
Always avoid this point when writing heading tag-
- Placing text in heading tags that wouldn’t be helpful in defining the structure of the page
- Using heading tags where other tags like <em> and <strong> may be more appropriate
- Erratically moving from one heading tag size to another
- Excessively using heading tags throughout the page
- Putting all of the page’s text into a heading tag
- 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 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,
<h3><data:title/></h3>
Replace it with the below code
<h2><data:title/></h2>
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.
