What Are Heading Tags and Why You Should Use Them?

You’ve written a great piece of content and you’re ready to publish it on your website. But hold on one second. Take a quick glance at what you wrote. What does it look like? How is it organized? Did you use the right heading tags?

If you didn’t organize your content using heading tags, you may be missing out. People browsing online may not find your content, or if they do, they may not read it. Heading tags can help you attract and retain those readers. 

What are heading tags?

Think of heading tags as an outline of your content. They’re HTML tags that indicate headings on a webpage. An H1 tag, or Heading 1, is the name or title of your piece of content. It’s the biggest and most important heading. Normally, you’ll use just one H1 tag for a page. From there, H2, H3, and H4 headings are used in numerical order, decreasing in size and importance. 

An example of a heading structure

Let’s say that you’re writing a blog post about Thanksgiving recipes. Your main keyword is “Thanksgiving recipes,” and in your post, you want to share some popular holiday dishes and how to make them. Using heading tags, you might structure your post like this:

• • H1: Delicious and easy Thanksgiving recipes 
    • H2: Appetizers to snack on
      • H3: Charcuterie board
      • H3: Spinach dip
      • H3: Deviled eggs

• • • H2: Side dishes
      • H3: Stuffing
      • H3: Sweet potatoes
      • H3: Cranberry Sauce
      • H3: Other side options

• • • H2: Main dishes
      • H3: Turkey
      • H3: Ham

If you’re not sure how to create your heading tags, labeling your content using a bullet list is a helpful way to plan and organize it. 

Page titles and H1 tags

One quick note about a Heading 1 and a Page Title: essentially, both kinds of tags describe what your content is about. The difference is where the tags appear. A page title tag, or <title>, isn’t actually present on your page. It appears within the search results from Google, and it also appears in the title bar at the top of your web browser. Using our Thanksgiving recipe example, “Delicious and easy Thanksgiving recipes” would pop up in search results, in the title bar, and also in a user’s bookmarks if they bookmarked your page.

In comparison, the H1 tag is expressed as <h1>. That’s what you’ll see on your page at the top, as the title. “Delicious and easy Thanksgiving recipes” is your H1 tag on your actual page.

Why should I use heading tags?

Give your content structure

Imagine that you’re scrolling through your regular daily news feed or blog feed online. After reading an enticing headline, you click on the article link to keep reading. However, you’re immediately met with a giant wall of text. You click away instantly and look for a different article on the same topic.

If you read a lot of content on the internet, this has probably happened to you. And it’s not necessarily the content’s fault, but how the content was presented. Most people don’t read websites word-for-word: they scan them. They look at large text that catches their eye, high-quality images, and text that’s easily digestible. So if your text isn’t easily scannable using smaller paragraphs broken up by heading tags, you’ll lose the attention of a lot of your readers.

Make your content easy to scan and follow with heading tags. Each heading tag should aptly describe its section or paragraph, letting readers know what to expect to read. If someone scrolls too far down or loses their place, a quick glance at a heading tag should help them find their way back, too.

Improve accessibility

Heading tags indicate headings on a webpage by using code to tell a web browser how to display content. That’s why and how they organize your content into a format that’s easy to read. 

In addition to general structure and readability, heading tags help improve accessibility for people who can’t easily read screens. How? Visually impaired readers might use a screen reader to read the text on a screen for them. Headings are in HTML, so by reading or listening to the headings in a piece of content, visually impaired readers can get the gist of an article and decide if they’d like to continue reading it. 

Screen readers also allow you to navigate through an article by jumping to the next heading. So when you have good descriptive heading tags, you improve the readability and navigation for those who are blind or visually impaired. 

Boost SEO

Even though page titles are the ones that appear in Google search results, it’s the H1 tags that are most important to search engine optimization or SEO. Search engines examine headings for appropriate keywords in a user’s search. If your headings match what people are searching for, generally, your content has a better chance of surfacing early in Google search results.

Even though page titles and H1 headers don’t fool search engines as easily anymore, writing them well is still important for the user experience.

Heading tags enhance readability and visibility

The way you organize your content can make a big difference in grabbing readers’ attention and keeping their focus on your page. Strong, descriptive heading tags give structure to your content and guide readers along. For those who are visually impaired, this can be especially helpful in navigating your content and making your point. Crafting unique, SEO-aligned headings is quick and easy, so it’s a good habit to start practicing with your content.