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Home » What is the Significance of HTML Header Tags on Rankings?

What is the Significance of HTML Header Tags on Rankings?

Header tags are not to be confused with the head section or portion of code in HTML. Header tags belong in the HTML body section. Header tags provide structure and ease navigation on your website.

How do you know what specifically a book is going to cover? You look in the table of contents and review the chapters.

Header tags are like chapters in a book. They outline your copy and breaks up the copy into readable chunks of information.

There are a number of header tags starting with the most important first: H1, H2, H3, H4, H5, etc. H2 acts as a sub-section of H1, H3 acts as a sub-section of H2, and so on. As the number of the tag gets larger, the font size gets smaller.

For most sites, you won’t have to go deeper than a H3 tag. The H1 tag should be included and used to describe the overall contents of the copy, very similarly to your title tag. It should be a lot more concise and describe the page exactly as it should.

If you have a significant amount of text on a page, using the header tags effectively could ease the readability of your website significantly resulting in better conversion rates.

If it is hard to read, your visitor is likely to abandon your site and visit another.

Let’s take a look at an example of how this can be used. Say you run a women’s fashion store. You would organize your site like so:

<H1>Women’s Fashionable Clothing and Accessories</H1>
  <H2>Clothing</H2>
  <H2>Clothing</H2>
    <H3>Tops and Blouses</H3>
    <H3>Skirts</H3>
    <H3>Dresses</H3>
  <H2>Accessories</H2>
    <H3>Handbags</H3>
    <H3>Watches</H3>
  <H2>Shoes</H2>

Organizing your site with header tags helps your visitor scan the page and find what they are looking for. Use it only to describe key sections of your text and not to emphasize copy on your web page because search engine bots use this information to score your site and rank it.

Filed Under: Search Engine Optimization Tips

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