Good afternoon, dear visitors.
Today there will be an article on the topic of H1-H6 headings for the site.
Surely, everyone already knows what kind of headings these are, but I'm sure that not everyone knows the subtle points in their use and not guess that their use on resource pages has only 2 tasks.
Purposes and use cases
The main 2 purpose of headings in H1-H6 tags is to design and structure content on resource pages in order to make it more readable and easily consumed by site visitors. We should not pursue any other goals from these tags.
In addition to simply being used as elements of structuring content and its design, visitors often use these tags to give the necessary design to individual phrases or even entire sentences. It turns out that the H6 tag (for example) has a design of just a bold font and instead of highlighting a line in the text with a tag , they wrap it in an H6 tag. This is fundamentally wrong.
Headings in these tags should only be used to break up text into logical parts. No selection of whole sentences and individual phrases.
In addition, the headings H1-H6 have a hierarchy, which makes them different in design, at least in font size. Each lower level should be less noticeable than the one above it.
The image shows the correct design of the headings in these tags, when the font size goes in descending order from the top to the bottom. If you have a situation different from this, then you should already turn to the design styles of your site and edit them properly.
But here is one point - make sure that the headings of the lower level (closer to H6) look like headings and do not merge with regular text. They should look like headings, not just bold.
Based on this design, we can understand that headings must maintain their hierarchy when used as an element of text structuring. It cannot be that the first heading H1 comes first, and then immediately H5 or H6. After the first level, it is logical and correct to use only the title in the H2 tag. This is important, both from the point of view of the design of the material itself, and from the point of view of maintaining the correct structure.
Search engines now pay attention to these tags. But not as SEO elements, but as structuring elements. Therefore, it will be strange if H1 goes, and then immediately H6.
When using these tags, we make sure to maintain the structure. If we go down a level, then no jumping through the level. The structure should be as follows: H1-H2-H3-H4-H5-H6.
It is worth saying that the use of the H1 level heading in these cases will not be appropriate, since it should be used only once on the page and should contain the name of the material. Therefore, it is not necessary to use it in the text.
Now I will cover the main points of using the H1 heading, but before that I will give a couple of general tips that are valid for headings of all levels.
- Do not end with a dot;
- We maintain a hierarchy when used;
- There is no purpose to place keywords;
- They take place even in very short articles, since any text can be divided into logical parts;
- In the heading enters a brief essence of the subsequent text, and not something "if only it were."
H1 basics
The above rules are also relevant, but in addition to them, there are mandatory ones for this particular heading level.
- H1 is always once on every page;
- We encourage the user to read the material, so it makes sense to use tenacious words (for example, secrets, best chips, and so on);
- We make it different from the title tag, which displays the name of the page in the search results and encourages the transition to the site page from the search. It should be slightly different, but it should definitely give an understanding that the context of the material on the page has not changed;
- We use the keyword of the article, but in a diluted form, and not in an exact occurrence;
- Punctuation marks are not recommended.
Use in practice
Above, I wrote that H1 is used only 1 time on the page and it should be automatically built into the layout of the site template and will also be substituted automatically in the header. Check this moment. Analyze your article titles and see if they are wrapped in H1. If this is not the case, then edit your template.
A common situation when instead of H1 is H2. This is not a gross mistake, but it is better not to allow this.
If we are talking about using the other levels of headings H2-H6, then they should already be used in manual mode.
Using some CMS to create a site, these headings are added to articles very simply. For example, in WordPress, the formatting panel in the page editor always has a headings entry where you can select the desired level by previously highlighting the desired text that you want to enclose in the heading.
It's the same with every engine. If you use the HTML layout of the site and you need to add tags manually, then there will be no difficulties. It is only necessary to enclose the necessary parts of the text between the opening and closing tags with the desired levels. See below for examples.
level 2 heading
level 3 heading
level 4 heading
level 5 heading
level 6 heading
As for the styles for each level, it is worth adding rules to each level in the style file.
Note that there are no dots or hashes before the heading level name in the styles. Inside the brackets, we specify the styles themselves: font type, size, color, background, and so on.
Heading design H1-H6
If you make your headers a unique eye-catching design, then visitors will only thank you for this and the design of the content will be at the highest level. Now simple headings with large font sizes and bold emphasis are already a thing of the past.
Simple, but at the same time, headings are coming into fashion with the help of various selections with lines, underlining with the help of the background, and so on.
I once gave some examples of such designs. Even if you take my blog, the main heading in H1 is not just a big font on a white background with the rest of the text. It is separated by a gray frame against the general background of the site, which makes it more visible and draws attention to it.
I will give you 2 more examples of styled headings in H1.
As you can see, this is not just a bold font, but a beautiful background with a wavy bottom surface and an underlined top.
You can also see an interesting design for yourself at this page.
As for the headings H2-H6, they can not only be decorated with some kind of background, but numbered (if you use the content at the top of the page) in the form of beautiful pictures. Again, these don't have to be simple numbers. Here is a good example of such an idea.
When you know something that most people don't know, let alone do, you can move on and look at the main mistakes in using all levels of headings on your site.
Mistakes in use
You could already think of all the mistakes yourself, having studied all the material above, but there are some nuances. I will list everything that may apply specifically to you and what needs to be corrected immediately.
- More than one H1 per page. It is not right. Only once per document;
- Using H1-H6 tags to design additional elements of the site. At the very beginning, I wrote that the purpose of these documents is the design and structuring of content. Therefore, they should only be used in content. Most site templates include these tags in the sidebars to style their titles and so on. This is clearly expressed in WordPress templates, when the name of each widget in the sidebar is enclosed in H3 or other tags.
- Specially enter keywords. Previously, there was an opinion that by entering keywords directly into the headings of all levels, you can increase their density and the position of such a page will be higher. But now this is already "punished by law" of search engines and sanctions are imposed for spam in the headlines. Moreover, these tags are ranked according to other algorithms. Conclusion: there is no purpose to enter keywords;
- Frequent use of periods and punctuation. Points in headings should not be used at all, as this is wrong from the point of view of both copywriting and general rules for the design of texts. We also try to minimize the number of punctuation marks in order to increase the readability of headings. A large number of words can also be attributed here - do not make headlines too long;
- The excerpt of the structure from the point of view of the hierarchy is not respected. Try to follow a logical chain in building a hierarchy of H2-H6 tags on each page;
- Using H1-H6 tags to style other text elements, not the title. This is what I talked about above, when the styling of each tag is incorrectly configured and instead of the usual bolding, you can use the heading of some level.
- The heading is not appropriate or does not carry the context of the text that follows it. To learn how to create logical headings, pick up a couple of well-designed books that are easy for you to read. Also be guided by the structuring of content on the Wikipedia site;
- Not using headings H1-H6 at all or not in small texts. Just a complete absence and there is nothing to talk about, but about the absence on small pages - the moment is doubtful, since any text (even the minimum 1000 characters) has a logical structure. Transition from one topic to another. Why not break it down into logical parts with subheadings of various levels?
That's all, dear webmasters. The material about the headlines on the site has come to an end. It came out pretty tight. Somewhere I repeated myself, but this is only to focus your attention on the key ideas of the article. I hope that this material was useful to you.
By the way, can you find a small flaw in my headings on the site? If yes, then write in the comments. This moment is not very noticeable, but it is there.
See you in the next posts. Still ahead.
Sincerely, Konstantin Khmelev!
The topic of today's video tutorial is headings in the h2-h6 range. What are these headers and what are they for?
You have a page. Above is the h1 heading (you can watch another video tutorial on this heading), then a piece of text and then more additional headings. These are headings that give the user an additional answer to the question they are asking. For example, if you have the main heading of the page "taxi", then in the additional headings you should write "taxi services", "taxi prices", etc. You must use the same keyword.
Additional titles affect the promotion of your site and show search engines that this is the same page and it can also be shown for this keyword. Headings h2-h6 help to positively increase the attention of search engines to this page for these queries.
How are h2-h6 headings written? All of these headings are equally valid. Do they all need to be used on the page? No. You need to use the keyword you are promoting to this page at least once in this title. If there can be only one h1, then there can be several h2-h6 headings. They do not need to be written like this: one h2, one h3, one h4. You can use, for example, four h2s per page. Any quantity you need, you can use. But most importantly: don't crash when you don't need to.
These headlines are similar in strength, but they differ visually. H2 looks big on the site, and h6 looks small. Therefore, choose the font that is optimal for you. The most popular ranges that are used on websites are h2 and h3.
How to check the competence of an SEO specialist and the strength of your competitors? You come in and punch. You open the page code, you see a bunch of characters, press ctrl + f, a search box appears, and you drive in “(h2” there and see if there are h2 headings on the page or not. If there is no h2, it’s not scary. Because we know that there must be at least one mention in this range, if there are no headings in the h2-h6 range, it's bad, but if there is at least one mention of the keyword, it's already good.
What should not be in additional headers? Garbage. What garbage? For example, the h3 range may contain the word “news”, “news about clients”, and some other words. If your site is not news, then you do not need the word to be in this range. Because anything you bet in the h2-h6 range is considered hyper-important information. Therefore, this heading should be on your site, it can be several times, and, most importantly, you can check both your SEOs and competitors, whether they have done it right.
The first is presence, the second is to have a keyword, and the third is to avoid garbage in the code. For example, if your page is about taxis, then the h3 should say “our taxi news”. Not just "news". Any headings should be meaningful.
» Using headings H1-H6
Using headings H1-H6
In this article, we will try to explain what h1-h6 tags are and how to use them correctly, taking into account website promotion. Since the correct use of headings will help you quickly and effortlessly reach higher positions in search engines. Headings H1-H6 are the most important accent tags and, along with title meta tags, are of great importance for proper SEO optimization of the site. Without this important link, it is simply impossible to bring the page to the top in a competitive topic.
Let's start with some rules for compiling headings in order of their importance:
- Use keywords in titles
- Spam is not allowed in headers of any level
- H1 tag should only be used once
- Header keywords must actually be present on the page
- The first level heading should be as high as possible in the page code
- Indicate important key phrases as close to the beginning of the title as possible
- Headlines should be informative and not too long.
- Try to compose key phrases in subheadings taking into account morphology and synonyms
- The first sentence after the heading should use the key from it
Using headings on a page
H1-H6 tags are designed to highlight the headings of the site pages and can be compared with the headings of books. All heading tags are paired, as in principle almost all others used in html, and if you want to highlight some phrase with them, then it must be enclosed between these tags. For example like this:
your passphrase between tags
, this construction is intended to highlight the main heading on the page, all subsequent ones should be used in the same way, taking into account descending.The most significant for SEO is the H1 tag and it serves as the main title of the page. It can be the title of an article, news or the name of a product, the word text enclosed in H1 plays the most important role, and between this tag there must be a key phrase that should have the most weight on the page. It is worth noting that the H1 heading should be used only once and contain the main and most significant keywords under which you plan to promote this page. The rules for writing titles are almost identical to the recommendations for writing a Title meta title, we advise you to familiarize yourself with them if you have not already done so.
Another important recommendation, the title meta tag and the first level title should not be identical and too long, you should not list the list of keywords you need there, 3-5 words will be enough. Otherwise, the keywords in the title will be blurry and will not have the maximum weight, or even worse, taken as spam by the search engine. If the search engine suspects that you want to deceive it, then this page will most likely be lowered in the search results. Be extremely careful and take your time when composing headlines, as mentioned above, they are one of the important ranking factors.
Unlike the first level heading, the others (H2-H6) can be used several times on the page, but as you may have guessed, they have a weight in descending order. These tags are used for subheadings and are also recommended to include significant key phrases in a diluted or clarifying way, so to speak. Use synonyms in them, write your key taking into account morphology, but do not make them too similar with the H1 heading. The words and phrases used must be present on the page in addition to headings and go in a logical order, and the first sentence after the heading should preferably correspond to it as much as possible.
You should never make headlines like this: "Welcome to the page ..." and the like. This will not bring anything good to the page and will take away the lion's share of its weight. Any title on your page should be intended not only for site visitors, but also for search engines. Headings on the page should not only be informative, but also not too long, when composing headings, you need to find a middle ground. Yandex and Google need to understand what the page is about, insert keywords into the H1-H6 tags, but without fanaticism, otherwise you can only make things worse.
It is worth noting that the H1-H6 heading tags must go strictly in descending order on the page. It is on the page and not in the text, since there are often cases when, for example, in free templates this is far from the case and this also reduces the weight of the desired keywords. There is an opinion that headings below H3 have no meaning for search engines and this of course may be true, but we still recommend using them to mark up text content, and not headings and blocks of other site elements. There are a huge number of other html tags for this.
Common Mistakes When Using Title Tags
Some CMS, or rather free templates for them, often sin by prescribing H1 tags in the wrong place, taking into account the correct internal optimization. Or highlight the headings of blocks and other site elements with H3 tags, this is fundamentally wrong for this, there are alternative tags in HTML.
Another common mistake that is present in some templates is layout errors in relation to seo and not following the W3C standard. Quite often you can find that on some sites H tags enclose links, images, logos in the site header, etc. Which reflects badly on the site as a whole.
Well, the last most common mistake is that, when using visual editors in the admin panel, site owners often leave empty headings in the text unwittingly, do not close these tags, which can confuse search engine bots and such pages will definitely be lowered in the search results. .
We have listed the 3 most common errors in the use of headers, of course there are others, but they are not so common and therefore were skipped. Be sure to check your pages on the site for these errors and be sure to eliminate them, and thus your site will be more attractive to search engines.
What does h1-h6 mean?
In any case, you need to start with theory, because without this it is impossible to move on. So, these are html tags that contain the text that should become the heading. H1 is the main title of the page, it should be the only one, h2 is the subtitle of the article or section of the chapter (if we are talking about a book), h3 is the title in the section, etc.
In site building, as a rule, h1-h3 are most often used, the last three tags are used extremely rarely, since there is no need to break the text into such small parts, unless we are talking about a huge text publication.
Headings are already styled by default. For example, the letters in the headings are in bold, and their size is 1.5 to 3 times the size of regular text on the page.
Basic rules for working with headers
How many h1 can be on the site? As much as you like, because an Internet resource can consist of many pages. Here it is much more important to adhere to another rule - there should be ONE h1 on each individual page of your site. This is because this is the main heading, and there should always be one main heading.
But what happens if you ignore this rule? As real practice shows, nothing catastrophic is likely to happen. I wouldn't write about it, but I know of several cases where webmasters had multiple h1s on a page, while all their articles kept their positions in search engines.
So it can be so, but you don’t need to specifically create several h1 on the page. It's still not right and it can still be harmful. For example, in the situations above, the webmasters had already aged sites promoted, so a few h1s on the page did not make things worse.
However, when promoting a young site, it is very important to observe various subtleties so that the resource gets the approval of search engines as quickly as possible and begins to bring traffic.
Obviously, h1 should be at the very beginning of the article. This is not the same as the title meta tag. Title is visible in the search results and in the title of the browser tab, and h1 is visible directly on the page. The rest of the headings (h2-h6) can be as many as you like, in any quantity.
How to check if h1 is present on a page?
Now we move on to the most important thing. How to determine if everything is normal on your site with a headline? There are at least a few options for how you can do this.
First, open the source code and search it. The source code is opened using the keyboard shortcut Ctrl + U. Next, you need the combination Ctrl + F to open the search. Enter the name of the desired tag in it, namely h1.
It will be correct if you find two results - the opening and closing tags, respectively. If there are more results, you need to make changes to the site template code. If h1 is absent at all, measures must also be taken to make it appear.
Secondly, you can use some service that analyzes the site for its search engine optimization indicators and issues a report. There are a lot of such services, I will give only a few: pr-cy.ru, audit.megaindex.ru/
In the Megaindex service, it is possible to check the relevance of a page, that is, how it is optimized for a specific key phrase. Enter the address of one of the pages on your site and the main keyword. In the case of checking only h1, this key phrase can be anything.
As you can see, the check showed that there are only 1 h1 on the page, which is good. If there were more, the check would definitely determine it. As you can see, this is an important factor, although not a critical one. Its non-observance will not lead to something catastrophic, but in search engine optimization, such problems should be removed first.
If a problem is found, how to solve it?
The solution is very simple, you just need to tweak your template code a little. First of all, you need to know what engine your site is on. The structure of templates for all engines may be slightly different, but still have a lot in common.
For example, in WordPress, you will need to edit the page.php (page template) and single.php (post template) files. It will also be useful to look at the index.php files (main page) and archive.php (archives by date and author), and sometimes there is also a category.php in themes (separate category entries).
Well, let's say you found and opened the desired file, what to do next? Then use the same search (Ctrl + F). Enter the tag name again. If there is not much code in the file, then you yourself can look through it and find the necessary lines. Here your actions depend on what exactly needs to be corrected.
For example, in one template, the title of the post was displayed in h2. Perhaps its developer does not understand SEO, which is why he made such a mistake. But this is easily fixed. We edit single.php and change h2 to h1 in it. This can be done both manually and using the automatic replacement function.
You may also need to edit the sidebar (sidebar.php). Actually, the extra h1 can be anywhere: in the headers of widgets, in the menu, and even in the footer (footer.php). All this needs to be found and removed.
Well, what if there are several h1s in the article itself? Then the problem is solved even easier - by editing the article itself. Remove all unnecessary h1, leaving only one main heading.
As you can see, you can deal with this problem yourself with absolutely no problems. To do this, you do not even need knowledge in the field of site building, but simply the elementary ability to find and open files, use the search and change the necessary lines a little. Yes, and there is no need to turn to an SEO specialist now, at least regarding the issue we have considered today.
Well, now you know how to check the h1 heading on the page and set up the template properly. Of course, this is just one of the many settings that will help you promote and monetize your site. You can find much more information if you study and withdraw it to an income of 20 thousand rubles a month in the shortest possible time. Good luck with everything and good positions in your search!
In this article, we will consider features of the correct placement of tags h1, h2…h6(h is an abbreviation for the English word heading - heading) and their impact on the optimization of the site as a whole. If the tags are incorrect, it is difficult for search engines to get information about the articles posted on your site and the keywords they contain. Tags allow you to highlight headings and make your article easier to read. In addition, they provide the benefits of your site in the ranking system by organizing the html code of the page.
How to determine that your site is under Google filters? Read more.
The title of your site denotes the h1 tag. It makes it possible for the search engine to understand the name of the online resource. For example, a site about renting servers. This name will be displayed in the main title when searching in the system. Don't confuse h1 with tag