Heading tags
Structuring the data on your web pages for best SEO effect.
Following on from our last two blogs about page titles and meta descriptions and the effect that these can have on improving your website traffic, this time we’ll take a quick look at “heading” tags and how these should be employed to structure your web page data correctly for maximum search engine friendliness.
What are ‘h’ tags?
Heading (h) tags are used to denote which elements of your text are most important. There is a scale from h1 through to h6 in descending order of importance as far as the hierarchical ranking of web page information is concerned. Each h tag can be styled differently in keeping with the style of your website – they really can be made to look like anything you want and each time you use them in your web pages, the allocated style will be adopted.
How are ‘h’ tags used?
Good designers use h tags to ensure the correct layout and hierarchical structuring of web page data. So your main title would likely have a h1 tag allocated, secondary sub-title h2 and then minor section titles h3. You can also allocate h4, h5 and h6 as you see fit but typically you would not need to go further than h3 in most cases. If you take a look at the source code of this page in your web browser, you will see exactly this kind of structure.
Why is it important?
The use of h tags is important to ensure good user experience and to assist search engine optmisation. Accessibility standards for web users who are sight-impaired, recommend the use of h tags to help make the structure of the page as clear as possible and also to assist with automated screen readers. Search engines crawlers, the automated “bots” which retrieve website data for indexing, also use h tags to determine which elements of a page are most important; so here it makes sense to use some of your keywords appropriately in your main headings and code them with the appropriate h tag. This way you are helping Google to understand what you are trying to promote via the text on your page.
As we saw with page titles and meta descriptions, some lazy website designers fail to use the correct tag notation when creating a web page. This only serves to create a format which is sub-optimal as far as Google is concerned and may also compromise those with disabilities too. It’s easy enough to check your page by viewing the source code to see what your web designer did.
It is also worth noting that Google is now very adept at determining what a web page is about simply through its ability to “understand” the text content therein. This does actually mean that there is perhaps slightly less reliance on h tags for SEO these days, albeit it’s still good practice and considered important to use them. As with your page titles, don’t “keyword stuff” your headings, instead, use your main keywords a few times across your h1 and h2 and then support them with contextually relevant, similar words. Here’s a quick example on the dental implant theme:
h1 – Latest dental implant treatment in Trumpton
h2 – How we use titanium implants to replace missing teeth
h3 – The dental implant process
h4 – The ‘teeth in a day’ technique
and so forth….
Summary
Heading tags are used to help structure the content of a web page correctly; both for users and search engines. Taking time to get this right will help with user experience and could give you a nice SEO boost in Google too. Check your dental website designer has done a decent job simply by viewing the source code of your web page.
If you would like a complimentary inspection of your website to ensure that all of the fundamental SEO elements are configured correctly, please give the Dental Media team a call on 01332 672548 and we’ll be pleased to assist.