How Important Are H Tags?
I recently delivered a training for a marketing group about things you’re probably missing on your website. One of the bullet items was H tags and relevancy.
As I thought about it more I felt it would be good to maybe blog about a few of the topics from that training as so many miss out some simple website techniques that could improve their on line business.
What The H?
So that we get everyone on the same page I’ll first explain what an “H” tag even is. The “H” in H tag is short for Headline. It is an HTML tag used to define headlines on your web page.
In original HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language) markup you have varying levels of the H tag ranging from H1 being the largest to H6 being the smallest. You would use these H tags to set the size of the headline.
As we progressed in web page layout to adding CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) we can better format the appearance of any HTML tags on our page including the font, color, size, etc.
What About SEO
It’s true H tags play a big part in SEO (Search Engine Optimization) as well.
We’re all looking for ways to get better placement in search engines so that we receive more visits to our web sites.
By properly utilizing H tags we’re telling the search engine what our content is about. For example on this article I’m using the H1 tag around the title “How Important Are H Tags?” So not only does H1 make it the largest text it denotes it as the most important title.
Like wise, the sub titles “What The H” and “What About SEO” are H2 tags to not only make them smaller than the initial headline but show the are important text that allows the reader to know what that section of the text is about.
But Is That All I Need To Know About The H Tag?
While that is the most important things you need to know it is also good to make sure that the H tags are relevant to the rest of the copy (text) on the page.
Adding the right H tags help to grab attention and invokes the reader to read on. You want to be sure that the body text for that section makes sense to what the headline is about.
Search Engines are getting smarter every day. You definitely don’t want to “game” the system. By following simple guidelines and using these in every day practice you will naturally get better at not only writing but also get better readership as your pages are better ranked in the search engines.
Photo by Artem Sapegin on Unsplash Edited By” Frank E. Deardurff III
