How to Use Heading Tags

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Do curso por University of California, Davis

Search Engine Optimization Fundamentals

885 ratings

University of California, Davis

Search Engine Optimization Fundamentals

885 ratings

Curso 2 de 6 em Specialization Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Gain an understanding of search engine algorithms and how they affect organic search results and websites. Building on this knowledge, you’ll learn the key elements for creating an effective SEO strategy, including how to select keywords and perform keyword research; consumer psychology and search behavior; and how to conduct on-page SEO analysis to identify opportunities to improve a website’s search optimization.

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Getting Started and Introduction to On-page SEO

Welcome to Week 1. This module will introduce you to On-page SEO. The lessons will start with introducing you to key areas of SEO so you’ll have a strong understanding of the differences amongst the strategies. Then we’ll dive into using On-page SEO techniques so that you’ll know how to optimize keywords in meta data as well as perform competitive analysis on a web page. By the end of this module, you’ll know how to identify meta-tags and use these to make recommendations for On-page SEO.

Introduction to On-page SEO0:48

Key Areas of SEO2:57

Meta Data and Meta Tags4:07

Title Tags 10110:49

Meta Descriptions Help Too!11:42

A Note About Meta Keywords3:18

URL Optimization6:59

How to Use Heading Tags8:30

Creating and Optimizing Unique Content8:58

Analyzing a Website Using a Web Crawler5:47

Conheça os instrutores

Rebekah May
SEO Manager & Lead SEO Instructor
LeadQual & UC Davis Extension

Hello again.

Headings, they're used in documents and papers to help organize them.

While that is also the case for

a webpage, the heading tags are also important for SEO.

In this lesson,

you'll learn the difference between types of heading tags and their importance.

From this, you'll be able to identify heading tags,

as well as be able to make recommendations for improving them to a client.

Documents you write, as well as webpages, have headings.

You have a primary heading referred to as an H1 or less frequently as heading 1,

and subheadings referred to as H2, H3, and so forth.

Heading tags not only help to stylistically break up

the content on the page, but are also useful for SEO.

Search engines look at the heading tags on a page

to better determine what the page is about and the page's structure.

From an SEO standpoint, the H1 tag is the most important of the heading tags,

and then H2 tags are somewhat important.

In the grand scheme of things, these are both small signals.

But it never hurts to have the heading tags optimized with keywords

as long as it sounds natural and not written for robots.

If you are unable to naturally incorporate keywords that reinforce the title tag of

the page and the page's theme, it's best to leave it out.

Subsequent heading tags, like H3 and so forth,

are not really looked at by search engines from an SEO standpoint.

So we usually only address H1s and H2s of clients.

It's a good idea to stick to one H1 per page, and

then use H2s as subsequent heading tags as needed.

Don't include multiple unnecessary heading tags on one page just to include keywords,

as this can make a page appear spammy.

You can view what elements of the page are H1 and

H2 tags by viewing the source code or by using a browser add-on.

I personally like Moz's add-on, but you can find any that works best for you.

When you start examining headings of a page, you will often find that

a portion of the text that looks like it should be an H1 or an H2 is not.

You may also find that some elements of the page are coded as a heading when they

really shouldn't be.

Our job as SEOs is to review the page and

make recommendations on where to adjust the heading tags, and

how to best incorporate keywords into the heading tags where possible.

I'm going to take a brief moment to show how you can identify heading

tags within a page.

In this demonstration,

we will walk through how you can identity heading tags on a page.

There are couple of different ways you can view heading tags on a page.

For example, if you want to know whether or not a specific area of text is

correctly coded as a heading tag, one way to find out is to highlight

that section of text, right-click, and then choose Inspect Element.

This will provide you with the view of the specific section of the source

code of the page.

In this case, we can see that the text we are looking at,

Line Making Certificate Program, is correctly wrapped in an H1 tag.

If you want to see all of the heading tags on a page without having to highlight

individual pieces of text individually, you can view the entire source code.

To do so, right-click anywhere on the page and then select View Page Source.

A window showing the source code of the page will pop up.

This isn't a very popular method as there's

a lot of information within the source code which can make it difficult to

find what you want to look for.

To find heading tags, you can always just perform a search for

the type of heading you are looking for.

For this example, I'll press Ctrl+F since I'm on a PC and then type in H1.

The first H1 it brings me to shows me that the H1 is the site name.

To view additional H1s, I can press Enter,

and then cycle through additional H1s on the page.

The next one brings me to the H1 we were examining earlier,

Wine Making Certificate Program.

If I press Enter again, it brings me right back to the first H1 we just saw,

which means these are the only two H1 tags on the page.

The next method is using a browser add-on.

In this example, I'll use the MozBar.

To view the heading tags, I can click on the magnifying glass and

then select Page Elements.

I can see the H1 here and the text of those H1s here under Content.

In general, you really only want or need one H1 per page.

And in this case, since the first H1 is the site name,

which is going to be the same across all pages within the site,

this is creating duplicate content, and isn't providing any value.

If this were a client, we would recommend that they remove the site name as the H1.

One of the downfalls of the MozBar is that it only picks up one H2 tag.

We can see that the H2 tag it's picking up in this case is secondary menu,

which isn't an optimal H2.

One of the recommendations we would make would be to remove the H2 tag from this

area as it's not helpful to SEO, and menus do not need to be wrapped in heading tags.

If we go to the page itself and look at code behind the second heading here,

Learn the Science Behind the Art of Wine Making, we can inspect this.

And we will see that this is an H2 tag as well.

This H2 is much more optimal.

If we were to inspect these additional heading tags such as about the program,

estimated cost, how to apply, we would see that each of these areas are all in H2s.

In some cases,

you can naturally incorporate keywords within these heading tags.

For example, instead of just saying about the program,

you might want to change this to about the wine making certification program.

You wouldn't want to do this for every H2.

But having one or two additional instances of keywords on the page is a good idea as

long as it sounds natural.

That wraps up this demonstration on how to find heading tags on a page.

So after reviewing that page,

we already have some recommendations we can provide to the client.

Remove the H1 from the site name.

Remove the H2 from the menu.

Incorporate a keyword into the second H2 tag.

Add H3 tags to subheadings near the bottom of the page.

Your assignment for

this lesson is to select two different sites of your own choosing.

Look at the homepage of the site and any interior page you want.

Find the H1 and the H2 of these pages, if they exist.

If the page has multiple H1s, list tags.

List any recommendations you have for improving the H1 and the H2.

You should now have an understanding of the different types of heading tags on

a page and the importance of each within an on page optimization strategy.

You should be able to identify heading tags on a page,

as well as the type of heading tags you are looking at.

In addition, you should be able to make recommendations for

improving heading tags within the page, whether this is adding heading tags,

removing heading tags, or incorporating keywords into existing headings.

That completes the video portion of this lesson.

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