Headings are the titles and subtitles of your content piece that help structure your writing in the most basic way.
- The main title of the content is the first heading or H1, then comes H2, H3, and so on. You can set these in your CMS (content management system, e.g. WordPress).
- Headings must follow a hierarchy Google “understands” and likes, as mentioned: H1, H2, H3, and so on. You can’t have an H1-H2-H4-H3 structure, for example, because an H2 can’t be followed by an H4, you have to keep the order for the algorithm to understand the hierarchy and relevancy of the points you are making. An H1-H2-H3-H2 order would be fine though where the H3 is the subpoint of the first H2.
- You must have only one H1 on the page, but you can have multiple of the H2 and H3 or even H4 headings on the page, too, but I’d advise you to not go “deeper” and stop leveling down at the H4 level. If you have that many subpoints that you need H5 and H6 headings or more, you should think about framing your information differently. Oftentimes that’s also a sign that you want to push too much into one content piece when it would be better to distribute the information into several blog posts.
- Headings can be used to ask questions that are based on suitable keywords (and possible SERP features, that you’ll learn about in a later lesson). You can do this in two ways: “What is an illustrator?” uses a question format, and “Definition of illustrator” does not, but they both prep the reader for getting the answer to their question.
- H1 should include the main targeted keyword, and consider using your secondary keywords in the other headings of your content.
Example ✍️
We have an article on our site, ‘How to advertise products online — 7 free or cheap ways’.
In this, after the main title or H1, we list the different ideas you can pick from as H2s. Then, in each H2 section, we have a subpoint titled, ‘How much does it cost?’ that is an H3, a subtopic of that H2, where we explain how much it would cost you to try that way of advertising. Then, the next main idea is also an H2, and so on.
This is an example of multiple H2s on the same page, which is a very common way of structuring content:
