Heading Titles – <h1> <h2> <h3>

All too often we come across websites that do not utilize the header titles on their pages so that they can be optimized for SEO. This is very unfortunate. By simply utilizing and optimizing h1, h2 and h3 (heading titles) you can increase your page’s ranking and thus have a much greater chance of being found in the search engines.

Why are h1, h2 and h3 so important for SEO?

Headlines are an important factor for SEO because they are used to communicate with the search engines, and they tell what your website is about. Search engines consider the heading texts as more important than the rest of the text on the page. So they start with your h1 and work their way down to h2 and h3 and so on. The heading texts will help you to make your page’s content stand out more clearly.
It’s important to remember that you can’t just throw out any words in the headlines. Leveraging the headlines with (short tail and long tail – how on earth do I translate this?) When search engines crawl your page, they pick up the headlines and they consider the keywords you use in the text to be important.

How to use h1, h2 and h3 header titles

Heading titles continue with h4, h5 and h6, but we will only focus on the first three since it is these headings that are most important in relation to SEO. The headings can’t just be thrown in anywhere, they have their own places on the page and must be used in a special order in order for you to get the best possible benefit from them. Naturally, you start with h1.

The H1 title should contain your targeted keywords, which well describe the page title and which are relevant to the content of your page.

The h2 title is a subheading and should contain keywords similar to those in h1.

The h3 title is further a subtitle to h2, and so on. You can see them as a hierarchy based on importance, where those at the top are more important than those below.

Remember that it is also very important that your heading titles are readable and grammatically correct. It’s no use just stuffing full h1, h2 and h3 with keywords, in the worst case, Google can then assume that you are trying to manipulate them. This is a no-go!