HTML Help & Resources

Headings: H1,H2,H3,H4,H5,H6

Headings are an important aspect of a document, because they represent an important series of words, or phrases, a visitor needs to see, perhaps to understand, or place in context, the entire document they are viewing. And, of course, search engines look for headings on pages, to assign relevance to documents, in combination with the document title, the meta description, and what words a searcher has requested to aid in finding relevant information.

In fact, headings are known, to be one of the highest, if not the highest, ranked items, in terms of HTML tags, that search engines value. So, if your documents do not contain headings anywhere, chances are you're documents are not optimized for search engines.

However, take note of the fact, a page only needs one major heading, which is the H1 tag. The H1 tag is the definitive heading on all pages, and should reflect, closely, what has been defined for the document title. The use of more than one H1 tag, on a single page, can lead search engines to determine you are attempting to manipulate search results, which could downgrade the quality of your page rank.

H2 through H6 are less important headings, and can be used to outline various distinguishable areas on a page. They are ranked in importance from H2 being the highest down through H6.

Avoid placing anything other than text, inside heading tags. Heading tags are exclusively used for text, and not images or graphics. You can, however, turn a heading into anchored text, linking information relative to the heading.

Move on to the Next Topic - Anchors and Linking.