Header tags optimization is one of the most important SEO onpage optimization. Many of the WordPress theme authors put more efforts to the theme layouts, CSS designs which make their themes look good. But they do not pay attention to the layout and usage of header tags. This will surely affect your keywords or key phrases ranking in search engine results such as Google. Search engines put more weight on the page header tags when forming the search result pages.
What Is Page Headers Or Header Tags?
The header tags are used to define HTML page headings. There are 6 of them, <h1> to <h6>. <h1> defines the largest page heading and <h6> defines the smallest page heading.
Optimizing Header Tags
From the seo onpage optimization perspective, <h1> is the most essential header tag and should appear on the top of the page, and only once, nothing more nothing less. We should place our most important keyword in <h1> header tag. When search engine reads a web page, it views the text from the top left hand side of the page to the bottom right hand side of the page.
<h2> header tag is next in hierarchy and can be thought of as a sub-heading for our web pages. You can have several <h2> tags below <h1> tag but not above. You are advised to place your 2nd most important keywords in the <h2> header tag.
Below each <h2> tag you can have several <h3> page headings and so forth. <h3>, <h4>, <h5> and <h6> header tags are not so important. But you must place <h1> and <h2> tags in the correct position.
Header Tags Solution For WordPress
If you’re running a blog using WordPress, the most important pages probably will be home page and the single article details page. The preferred solution of optimizing header tags for these 2 pages are as follows.
Home Page
<h1> page heading should be blog title or blog description, blog title is preferred. Post titles should go to <h2> header tag.
Single Article Page
Post title should be assigned to <h1> header tag. You should place <h2> or lower page headers to the headings inside post contents. And just use <p> tag for blog title and blog description. No heading for them in this page.
Conclusion
In summary, I’d like to point out that although header tags optimization is something you should do, it’s not how you make great jump in your search engine ranking because there’re other factors affecting the results. I’ll talk about more in future post.
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never know header can affect the SEO as well, need to further improve my blog now, thanks,
thats cool, thnk’s for your information
Very informative post. I thought by using the all in one seo plugin it would take care of those tags for me, but that doesn’t appear to be the case. I will have to do it manually, now I just need to figure out how to do that!
It looks complicated…
Letmeread it again…:)
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