Heading Tags Helper

Heading tags are easy to overlook. Many sites I visit don’t use heading tags at all. Ooops. Not a good time for early onset of Alzheimer’s.

Don’t want to forget these babies. Because it’s the title of your page for crying out loud. So you can only conclude it absence hurts you where it counts. In the rankings.

Other sites may have one but it’s the ever so lame-o…"Welcome to My Site" type. Or some variation there of. Just like their title tag.

Googlebot takes one look at that and groans - "Oh no, not again". So don’t count on help in the rankings with one of those then either.

Anyway, with that in mind here are some heading tag helpers.

Right off the bat it’s a good idea to repeat your focus keyword immediately in an H1 page heading. As close to the end of the BODY tag as you can.

You may even think about repeating your title tag exactly. Not a bad idea.

If you don’t like how H1 tags use Cascading Style Sheets to alter the font size. You can feel free to do so without worrying about what Google will think. It won’t care.

After that H2, and H3 tags are the other biggies.

If I have a list of say 5 tips for using blue widgets, I’ll stick those in an sub heading (H3) tag and at least once work the phrase "blue widgets" into one of them.

If you have a heading that reads "spec sheet" don’t leave it at that. Why not make it "blue widget spec sheet"? Seems only logical. And gets your primary keyword into another heading tag and makes points with Google.

Many would suggest you use heading tags as a hierarchy.

H1 - Used once per page as the main heading at the top of the page.

H2 - Used as subheadings on the page. Can be more than one to break up text but should be genuine headings.

H3 - Used as sub-subheadings nested within H2s.

I’m not a purist when it comes to that. Can’t say if Google is or not either. This may fall under the category of usability than anything else. Making little or no impact on Google.

But I can say using heading tags properly, bristling with keywords, does matter. Heading tags are another obvious basic of on page optimization that unfortunately too many forget or ignore entirely. Don’t let that be you.