Website Headlines: Understanding Heading Tags By Jen Kelly

Posted by admin on January 27, 2012 – 1:47 pm

Open up any newspaper or magazine and you will see headlines. These headlines are big and bold and they are meant to grab your attention. The Internet also uses headlines. These headlines are created with heading tags. But what are heading tags and how do they work? It doesn’t take much learning to become a heading tag expert.

What Are Heading Tags?

The words and phrases that are larger and darker than the rest of a web page’s text are the page’s headings. They’re found at the top of the text they describe. The H1, H2, and H3 tags are the most commonly used heading tags, though you’ll occasionally see H4, H5, and H6 tags. The H1 tag is the largest heading tag and the H6 tag is the smallest. In HTML, a heading tag might look something like this:

<h1>What Are Heading Tags?</h1>

Why Are Headings Important?

Headings equal happy visitors. A visitor is more likely to linger on a web page if the page looks professional, and one easy way to make a page more professional looking is to include heading tags. They have the power to give a web page an instant makeover, and more importantly, they tell your visitors what your page is about. When a visitor first arrives on a web page he’ll likely scan the page for big, bold headlines that tell him what each section is about. He can immediately see if the web page is right for him. And headlines also make it easier to skim. People on the Internet don’t have time to read every word of every single site they visit. They like to find the sections that fit their current reading needs. Relevant headings make skimming a hundred times easier.

In addition to happy readers, heading tags make for happy search engines. Heading tags are more important to search engines than the rest of a page’s text is, with the H1 tag being the most important, and the H6 tag being the least. They improve your keyword prominence, a search engine ranking factor that refers to the prominent placement of your keywords. And headings are similar to titles in that they immediately tell the search engines what a web page is about. Search engines will rank a page for the keywords that are in the heading tags.

How Do You Create Headings?

When you’re creating heading tags, you should keep them short and relevant, and you should always include your page’s targeted keywords. Each page on your site should have a big H1 heading at the top of it. This is the heading that should include your page’s main keyword. It’s usually best to have only one H1 heading tag per page. H2 tags are great places to put your secondary keywords. These are your page’s sub-headings. And it’s also common to use H3 tags for sub-sub-headings. If your web page is large, you may even want to use H4-H6 heading tags.

Any web page will dramatically improve with the inclusion of headings. Not only do headings make a page aesthetically pleasing to visitors and easy to read, they improve your page’s search engine optimization. Once you understand heading tags, creating great headlines will be a breeze, and your web pages will greatly benefit.

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