How to Use Heading Tags to Get More Search Engine Traffic

Why are Head tags important?

Head tags are essential when it comes to the number of people that searches for a specific topic and how often it is searched. By definition, these are HTML (hypertext markup language) tags that specify headers on a website. This language is used to create pages on websites, while Tags are the code that tells a web browser how the content should be displayed on the page. There are six types of heading tags:

These tags can be added before publishing a work. Whether you’re using Docs, Microsoft Word, or another platform to produce content, you’ll be able to find those header options in the menu bar. Be aware that the possibilities for H4 and higher won’t appear until after you add H3 tags to your content and that changing the size of the font alone doesn’t equate to a heading tag.

There has been a debate for quite some time amongst SEO experts about how much of an impact heading tags have on SEO, but it is no secret that heading tags play a factor in your search ranking. That’s because they make it easier for search engines to read and interpret your content.

If you have big walls of text without subheaders, it’s going to be difficult for bots to know what your page is about, heading tags explain the importance of topics on the page. Without headers, you’re relying on search engines to take all of your text at the same face value, which won’t help your search ranking.

John Mueller -senior webmaster trends analyst at Google- said that Google uses H tags to understand the structure of text on a page, meaning that they do provide some SEO value. In addition to that, adding these to your site will also help improve the user experience. As a result, you’ll get more traffic to your website, frequent repeat visitors, and people will stay on your site for more extended periods. This, because it makes your content cleaner and more organized. 43% of people say that they skim blog posts. So, to make your content easy to skim, headers must be added. It’s important to understand that it is possible to get this same effect by just making the font bigger and bolder, but then you wouldn’t be taking advantage of the header tags to get the SEO benefits.

How to take the most advantage out of a Head tag?

• H1 tags should be saved for the title -which is the most important head tag-. Adding more than one will be less visually appealing, and it could potentially confuse crawlers when they’re indexing your content.

• If you can get some keywords in there, that’s great. If not, don’t try to force it. Make your head tag natural and readable. It’s a common misconception that every heading tag needs to be stuffed with keywords, and even though these can be helpful, the overuse of keyword can cause more damage than good.

• In most cases, it is not necessary to go beyond H3 or H4. SEO aside, it could be too complex for the reader. So find other ways to organize your content instead. You could always use bold or italics to emphasize something, as opposed to getting to H6.

Conclusion

Heading tags are a subtle yet powerful SEO hack. In addition to showcasing quality content to search engine crawlers, they make it easier for website visitors to consume content on your page. The correct use of head tags can increase the traffic in your site exponentially, and possibly, allure the reader to stay a longer time in it, simultaneously increasing your SEO value.