I’ve worked on a few different sites now where I’ve been auditing old posts and realised that the owner has been using their blog headings completely wrong. When I say blog headings I mean headers, or the small titles which break up text on a page. I’ve talked about how headers are the queen’s to content’s king before.
What are Blog Headings?
That above is a blog heading.
Blog headings are mini-headlines for you to break up your blog posts, and are created with heading tags which are HTML. When adding heading tags, you assign importance to specific parts of your content when your audience reads, but also when search engines come looking.
Heading tags start at H1 to H6, where H1 has the highest importance and H6 has the least. H1 is nearly always the title of your blog post, whereas H2-H6 are used within your blog posts. On my blog they look like:
Header 3
Header 4
Header 5
Header 6
But on yours, depending on your theme and CSS, they may look different.
Does H1 – H6 Order Matter?
Yes order does matter – especially for SEO purposes. Heading tags have a logical hierarchical order which indicates their importance. Where header 1 is the title, your blog posts will start sectioning content with header 2. As you start to section your content within those headers, you will us header 3 and so on.
This order should help your audience understand which information is closely linked – for example this section is about the order of headings tags, but a section lower down talks about what you should put in your headings. Being able to separate content also helps the user experience as it helps people read and retain information better.
However, it also help search engines know more about your blog. As your site is crawled, each of these headings will inform it what your site is about where H1 is the title of your blog post and the most important part of your page, so there shouldn’t be another H1 tag used or it will confuse the crawler about what is the most important.
When Should You Use Heading Tags?
Every. Single. Page. If your blog is set up correctly then your H1 will automatically be part of your blog post as your title. Whilst the rest of the headings are optional, I would recommend you use a few H2s at least. This is to split out content into section which makes it easier to read and helps yoru readers.
What You Should Put in Headings
Treat your headings as mini titles. They should catch people’s attention and encourage your readers to keep reading. A lot of people will skim read posts to find a specific answer, especially those who are looking for information rather than reading your posts more passively. Making it easy for these people to pick out that info can encourage them to read more and stay on page for longer.
For SEO, ensure that some of them include keywords you want to rank for.
How to Alter the Look of Blog Headings
Some bloggers use random H2-H6 headings based on what they look like with their theme. Some themes will change the size, or font, or colour, or multiples of these aspect. So figuring out exactly what look you want is vital.
If you use WordPress, it’s super simple to customise the look of your headings so you can use your headings in order, without worrying about the look. Find the “Additional CSS” tab when customising your blog which allows you to basically overwrite your theme CSS to better fit what you want.
Type in h2{font-size:14px;} where h2 is Header 2 and you can change 14 to whatever size you prefer. Using it in the customise menu allows you to see the changes instantly.