Hi, guys, welcome back to the “Top Ten Must-Dos for Good Blog Posts.” This second installment is all about proper headings in your blog post.
Why Are Proper Headings Important?
Headings and subheadings are super-important, not only for readability and scannability, but also for SEO. So, for readability, you’ve seen headings of different sizes. It helps break up the content. It helps important things stand out. For SEO, it’s not a major ranking signal, but it is important, and Google follows a hierarchical structure, so you want to stick with that.
H1 Through H6
For instance, in HTML code, your heading choices are sorted as H1 through H6. Your rule of thumb here is that your headline — which we discussed in the first post, Compelling Headline — is going to be your H1. That’s your most important tag. Your H2s are going to be major points, followed by H3s, H4s, and so on. Most people use H1 through H3 the most often. That’s what we kind of do, as well.
Following these guidelines makes using proper headings simple. Your post title is your H1, your major point, H2, followed by subpoints, H3s, and so on. You can go back to your second major point as an H2, followed by subpoints, H3s, and so on, and repeat that as many times as you need to. So, you can go back from an H2 to another H2 as long as you’re not skipping levels, if that makes sense. And it’s okay to have text in between them.
You do not want to stuff keywords into your headings (or your text!) That’s spammy. Don’t just jam all your keywords into your headings. Google will flag that as spam. But, we do recommend having your focus keywords, which we’ll talk about in another video later, in one heading, and preferably in an H2.
We’ll talk more about keywords later, but it’s important to have headings and help users who are scanning to really understand what the page is about. The hierarchical structure helps Google also understand what the page is about as well.
Our “Blog Writing Guide” eBook has 10 tips on making the best blog posts possible. If you’re interested, you can fill out a form and download it here.
