SEO Tips

SEO Quick Tips: H1 & H2 Tags

SEO H1 & H2 Tagging

H1 & H2 SEO Headings

Today's topic is a simple one that often goes overlooked in web design, and especially so when a business owner or company is attempting to do their own SEO: how to properly utilize the heading elements.

Why Are Heading Tags Important?

Implementing heading tags, and in particular utilizing the h1 and h2 elements, is something that is useful for not only giving users a quick preview of what your page is really about (and even disabled users- but we'll leave accessibility for another day), but it also is something search spiders are looking for and often put extra weight on when evaluating a page. Therefore, making sure you have concise and keyworded headings is generally good practice.

How Can I Properly Add Headings?

Headings are essentially main points in an outline. Part of readability is directly related to the way you outline your content, and again this not only helps your users find what they want faster, but it also benefits you in regards to SEO. This is the same reason plugins for WordPress sites like Yoast offer features to evaluate these aspects of your content.

If you don't use WordPress, that can be a good thing if you make it one, so don't fret. Just be wary of keyword spamming and do your best to at least include an h1 element on each page and you are on the right track.

How Are Sites Improperly Using Headings?

Something you actually should check on your own site is whether or not your headings are actually using the h1 or h2 element. One major way site owners are missing out on the SEO benefits of headings is that they often are using lesser valued headings like h5's because the way their stylesheet is defaulted that seems to be a good font size and using h1's would be far too big.

In this case though, instead of using a lesser valued tag you should most definitely be reworking your CSS instead so that the styling for h1's is that of your current h5 styling. Then the only step left is to go change all those tags!

Is That All There is to H1 & H2 Headings?

Sure more can be said, but the main takeaway from this is that site owners should be checking their headings using their browser's dev tools or asking their web team to make sure they are using high value headings instead of lazily just using whatever heading tag has the best default font-size for how big they want the heading to look.

If you are making that mistake on your site, then you are disregarding a very simple improvement to your SEO that will actually give results. Are the benefits so good that you won't need to do much else to your site if it's already optimized to a degree? Never, and that's only because SEO is always changing and there is literally always something you can be doing - especially with how detailed structured data can be nowadays (again- a topic for the future).

Hopefully if you've read this through, you now better understand the value of proper headings and can see where you may or may not be going wrong in your implementations.

Until next time!

-Tucci Creative

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