Kyle Williams.com

What are heading tags?

The HTML tags <h1> through <h6> are used as headings when creating text content. H1 should be the largest of the tags, and is generally used to surround the title of the page or the title of you site. H2 could be used as a secondary header, highlighting specific sections of the page.

The basic structure of heading tags

<h1>LCD TV Review</h1>

(a paragraph or so introduction)

<h2>What about Plasma TVs?</h2>

(content)

<h3>Plasma TV Review</h3>

(content)

<h2>How are LCD TVs different than computer displays</h2>

(content)

<h2>Future of LCD Technology</h2>

(content)

You can use as many, or as few heading tags as your overall web design requires. When it comes to specific SEO advice, I always recommend sticking with the original intentions of the given HTML tag. I do not recommend making the h1 tag smaller than the subsequent tags. So don’t be tricky when stylizing heading tags with CSS.

Advanced SEO techniques using heading tags

The following thoughts have not been tested, however they are logical. When it comes to SEO theories, I prefer to stick with the factual fundamentals, and then expand on the fundamentals with a good user experience. These opinions follow that mindset.

Lets look again at the example above, a review of LCD TVs. In this example, the primary keyword phrase we’re going after is “lcd tv review”. Logically, the H1 tag should state “LCD TV Review”. This helps us communicate to Google that the purpose of this article is to review the LCD TV. Ideally, we should incorporate the words “lcd” “tv” and “review” in the h2 and h3 tags within the article. But what if we feel the article doesn’t read nice with too much keyword repetition? Often times, repetition in writing for search engines can get out of hand, and that hurts the user experience. Are there other words we could use, that may benefit the goal of targeting “LCD TV Review”?

Go to Google and enter: ~lcd -lcd. This query looks for words that Google feels are similar to LCD, but will not include the word LCD. If you don’t add the -lcd in the query, your results will be littered with the keyword LCD which makes research more difficult. I also recommend setting the number of results to 100, for quicker reading. Words in bold are words that Google associates with LCD. We have now found a quick and easy way to find confirmed related keywords, direct from Google.

This technique does not stop with heading tags. It should be considered and used in every aspect of your content writing. The good news – most of this keyword selection will happen naturally because it makes sense to use related keywords when talking about a given topic. It isn’t like we’re going to have an <h2> within our LCD TV review that says <h2>Poker is fun</h2>.