Headers are crucial to a well-structured website page and you should use them. Correction – you need to use them.

If you’re unsure of how to use them, this article will leave you feeling much more confident about what they are and how to use them correctly on your website.

About Headers

Let’s start with a lesson on headers.

Headers are titles on a website page. There are six types of headers.

H1: This is the main header. It’s the title.

H2: This is a subheader, or subheading.

H3: This is a subsection of the subheader.

H4: This gives readers a bit more information about the subsection.

Most people seldom use H4 and hardly ever use H5 and H6. Usually, bullet points are sufficient if you want to list points that have to do with a subsection.

Why Headers Are Important

Now that you know what they are, let’s get into why you should use them.

Headers Make Pages Scannable

Most people rarely read articles in their entirety online. They scan them. The only time they read every word of an article is when they are highly interested in the topic.

Headers make it easier for people to scan the page for information. They often start with the first header. If it interests them, they will move on to a subheading. The subheading usually gives them one piece of the information they were looking for, and then the next subheading gives them another piece of information. If they want details, they will read what is in between those subheadings.

Using headers that accurately reflect what is in your article will help to make sure people actually read your content. Content marketing is important and requires a lot of effort and you want to make sure you see a return on that effort. Make sure your headers and subheaders are engaging and also accurate and you’ll be more likely to attract people who want to learn more about what you have to offer.

Headers Help Your SEO

Headers are an important part of on-page SEO. Search engines, such as Google, love headers for the same reason people do — headers make reading content easy and quick. When a search engine bot can crawl a website page by going from one heading to the next, it can grasp the gist of the information. This way it knows which online searches to rank your pages in.

When creating your headers, think about the keywords you want your page to rank for. If you can’t naturally use these keywords in your headers, then it’s possible that you need to rethink the copy on the rest of your page. Your headers should provide a general overview of the content on your page or in your blog post, and you want that content to be relevant to the searches you’d like to rank for in Google.

Usability for Mobile Devices

As we move forward into the world of voice search, headers are becoming even more important. When someone uses a mobile device to search online, Google will scan website pages paying particular attention to headers. If the headers match what the person is searching for, it will deliver the content.

This means that if your page doesn’t have any headers, there’s a good chance the device will not pick up that it is relevant to the search. This leads to lost opportunities for improving your SEO.

Always Use Headers

As you can see, headers help both people and search engines understand what your content is about. Do an audit of your site and see if there are pages that are missing headers and add them. From now on, make sure that all of your published content has a heading structure that makes sense. This way you can provide your readers with exactly what they want – a quick, simple way to get the answers to their questions.

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