Header Format, H1, H2, H3 Tags

How To Use Header Format: H1, H2, H3 Tags

Header tags are an effective way to communicate to the search engines and readers what a page is about. They convey the importance of the text inside of the header tag. Often times, the header tags are not in the proper order. This is how a header tag would appear in the page.

<h1>Header</h1> — The Theme Of The Page

<h2>Header</h2> — Main Sub Sections Of <h1>

<h3>Header Text</h3> — Sub Sections Of <h2>

The <h1> header tag is the largest font. The <h2> tag is smaller than the <h1> tag but larger than the <h3> tag and so on to <h6>. However, the font size of each header tag can be easily adjusted with css making it possible for all headers to appear the same size:

h1, h2, h3, h4 {font-size:12pt}

The major mistake most webmasters make is creating the header of the website using the <h1> or <h2> tag. When this occurs, the header tags do not change from page to page making it irrelevant. If you want to use text in your header, you can easily format a div or paragraph to look like an <h1> tag with very little difficulty.

The <h1> tag should appear just above the content of the web page. It should closely match the title tag and be relevant to the content of the page. The <h2> and <h3> tags can than follow with relevant keywords related to the <h1> tag. It is also important for all the header tags to be grammatically correct and easily readable. Don’t just keyword stuff! Google can detect keyword stuffing very easily. If they believe that your page is more geared towards them than your audience, they won’t give you an audience. So make sure your header tags make perfect sense to your readers.

You may have heard of “siloing” or “theming” a website, which is a very effective technique for SEO.  I use the same concept for some web pages using header tags as depicted in the graphic below.

Simply by doing a little h1 tag SEO and rearranging content with header tags I have seen web page SERPs jump almost immediately