Correct Use of Heading Tags

Using your heading tags correctly can be the difference between being found on google and other search engines and not being found at all. My most recent post about heading tags is titled, What are heading tags? What do they do? This post discusses with you not only what heading tags are, but this post also discusses how google perceives these tags and uses them in it's ranking system.

Today, I want to show you the correct use of your heading tags. Believe it or not, there is a right and a wrong way to use these tags. If used correctly, heading tags can be your best friend.

Heading tags are used to outline upcoming information.
Many people have the idea that heading tags should be used for keyword stuffing, otherwise known as having poor SEO and web design skills. In reality, heading tags should be used to tell people what's to come in that website, post, sidebar navigation, and or paragraph.

For example. My website is titled, "Video Blogging Tips." Since this is the name of my website and it outlines what my site is about it should be in a h1 heading tag. You follow?

Putting heading tags to correct use.
Now that you know that the title of your website should go in the h1 tag, what do you do with the h2, h3, and h4 tags? Here is the basic idea.

h1 heading tags - H1 heading tags should be used around the title of your website. For they are the first and most important words on your site. There should only be one h1 heading tag throughout your entire website.

h2 heading tags - H2 heading tags should used around the post title's of your website. These are usually titles of articles you have written. There can be as many h2 tags as you want throughout your site, but be sure to limit them to being just around the post title's of your website.

h3 heading tags - H3 heading tags generally go around each category of your sidebar's navigation. If you look at my sidebar, all the words that are written in white text with the blue background are surrounded by h3 heading tags. There can be as many h3 tags as you want throughout your site, but, like the h2 tags, you should be sure to limit them to just being around the sidebar category titles.

h4 heading tags - H4 tags are seldom used. I personally don't use them as that would create a mess of heading tags on my page. Instead, I recommend using bold tags like I use in posts, to separate paragraph from paragraph.

Update: I have recently decided to use the h4 tags. I needed to make sub categories of sub categories in some of my post's articles. With that being said, the title of my posts are in h2 tags, the sub categories in my posts are in h3 tags and the sidebar navigation categories are in h4 tags.

Using heading tags correctly can make you.
In the end, heading tags are really important. They can really be the difference in your success. Obviously, this isn't completely true as, in reality, content is king. Then again, it never hurts to get a little boost from using heading tags correctly.

If you're a blogger user, like me, I have a post written specifically for you on optimizing your heading tags for blogger. The post is titled, "SEO Tips - Heading Tags and Blogger."

As for everybody else, if you use the tips provided in the article you have just read, your heading tags will be put to correct use and your ranking in google will surely rise.