When used correctly, H Tags (H1, H2, H3, H4, H5, H6) help your readers and search engines understand your blog posts and pages better, improving your SEO, thus resulting in better search engine rankings and more traffic. H Tags are just like the headings and subheadings in our everyday texts.
Why are headings and subheadings important?
Headings and subheadings in any text make your blog post easier to understand and more enjoyable to read for your intended audience.
When you organise your website headings using H tags in the right way, it not only improves the structure but also helps search engines read and understand your text.
In this post, I will explain briefly what H Tags are and how important they are to improve your SEO and grow your blog.
But again, what exactly are H tags?
What are H tags?
An H tag is an HTML tag used on a webpage to separate headings and subheadings. HTML tags are keywords on a web page that tell your web browser how to format and display the contents. H tags provide structure to an HTML file and tell the web browser how to display a heading.
H tags are used to differentiate the headings and subheadings in a blog post from the remaining content. WordPress has 6 heading tags: H1-H6. H1 is usually used for the title of the blog post, and H2-H6 is used for the subheadings within the blog post. An H tag will usually be formatted differently from the rest of the text, e.g., in bold, italics, capitals, font style, and colour.
Why are H Tags important?
1. To make your text easy to understand and enjoyable to read
The primary and most important reason to use H tags for your blog post is that they make your content more readable, easy to understand and enjoyable for your readers.
Wait! Think of a blog post with no subheadings. You would leave your readers with a boring wall of text!
Adding subheadings makes your blog post much easier and more pleasant to read. It also helps your readers quickly glance over your blog post to see if it answers their questions and helps them easily locate the information they actually need.
Put simply, the more enjoyable your readers find your blog, the higher it will rank in search engine results. As your blog post rises in rankings, it attracts more traffic. So, providing a great experience for your readers not only enhances your blog’s visibility but also drives increased traffic your way.
Since H tags give your readers a pleasant experience, they will ultimately help you get more traffic, which is important for SEO..
2. To improve web accessibility of your website
Using H tags the right way will also improve the accessibility of your blog, particularly for visually impaired readers.
Screen readers play a crucial role in assisting visually impaired individuals to explore a blog post.
They achieve this by reading the headings out loud, allowing users to navigate seamlessly.
Screen readers often provide shortcuts, enabling users to swiftly move from one heading to another, offering a convenient way to grasp the overall content of the blog post. So, as users listen to the content’s headings, they can decide if the blog post gives them what they are looking for.
Screen readers not only help users navigate effortlessly between subheadings, enhancing overall accessibility, but it’s important to note that accessibility improvements also contribute positively to SEO.
When your content is more accessible to users, it tends to be generally good for SEO.
3. To help search engines understand your content better
H tags not only help your readers, but they also help search engines better understand the content of your blog posts.
Search engines read your H tags, e.g., your title tag, to understand your blog post and how it is structured. While most of your post readers would be contented with headings being formatted in bold/italics/colours, search engines read the HTML version of your site and so need you to use H tags to denote headings.
Search engines rely on H tags to grasp the essence of your blog post. These tags assist search engines in figuring out if your blog post aligns with a user’s search.
The clearer your content is to search engines, the more accurately they can identify the queries your blog post should be ranked for. So this again has a positive effect on your SEO and, subsequently, traffic.
4. To rank better and get more traffic
As explained in the previous points, the overall summation of why H Tags are important is that using H tags correctly will improve your SEO in multiple ways and help your content rank better when it comes to SERP, leading to more traffic to your website.
Conclusion
Having covered a lot about H tags in this post to provide you with a clear understanding of their importance for SEO. What importance of H Tags would you like to have gone more in-depth on or added? If you have questions or need further clarification, please drop them in the comments section below.