Importance of headings in your web content

One of the most commonly known SEO practices is breaking up your web page content with headings. Ranging from h1 as the biggest, highest importance through to h6 which is slightly bigger than the body text.

This is done for a good reason, in fact there are many reasons why headings are used in webpages and its not just for SEO factors.

Why use headings?

Using headings makes sense from both a web user and crawler sense. The user can get a quick overlock for what the paragraphs below contain and the crawler can structure this in its findings.

webpage headings example sizes

Similar to a table of contents but for only one page, headings will organise and structure a web page.

The page visitor benefits

Often a visitor to your web page may not need to read the whole contents, this is where a well-stated heading can help them find the part they came to your page for.

Breaking up the content into sections is also a use for smaller headings, I personally do this for my “how-to” posts.

Benefits your SEO

If you are including keyword terms in your headings then your SEO benefits greatly. The crawler knows what substructure of content belongs to certain terms and search queries.

If you had not noticed Google search will get the best result in a paragraph and display it in a knowledge panel along with similar questions.

Google knowledge panel SEO
Google knowledge panel

Headings would be one of the bigger helpers in getting Google this information.

Heading usage

Bare minimum amount of headings would be one h1, two h2’s and h3’s. However this is dependent on the page content. Sometimes it would be hard to put in multiple headings or the content would look silly such as a photos post that has minimal text.

A good principle to follow is to avoid overusing headings but break up and structure your content with them, including keywords and terms in them.

For this post the title will be a h1 heading, I filled the rest out as h2 and h3. The title being “Importance of headings in your web content” as the main heading (h1) sets the scene for what the whole page stems from.