hey everybody in this short video will show you how to improve your site's SEO
score by using and optimizing h1 and h2 that is heading 1 and heading 2 tags on your site
Now these are heading tags within your code that applying certain
style attributes to a particular line of text
Then when search engines scan your
site one of the first places they'll focus on to determine what sort of
content you have on the site will be the text that you have inside these heading tags
so these tags are useful for both search engines which of course has a
direct impact on your SEO
but also for user experience which has a secondary impact on your SEO
because users that are looking for the type of content your
site offers will be able to find your site through search engines more effectively
then once they are actually visiting your site with h1 tags
typically being the largest and most noticeable text on the page and h2 tags
typically being the next largest and most noticeable
your visitors are therefore better able to quickly scan the site with their eyes and find the
content they're looking for
And then from that the more likely they are to stay on your site
So this in turn decreases bounce rate and increases
visitor time which will therefore improve your rankings in the search engines
So properly styled h1 and h2 tags will benefit user experience as well as SEO score
It's sort of a chicken egg situation but in this case luckily
for you you can optimize both chicken and egg.
So let's look at what we can do
here and what we can avoid when it comes to the search engines
After running our sites here on SEO site checkup we can see that we have a couple of issues
We have no head in one tags at all
and we probably have way too many heading 2 tags
without these h1 tags search engines may not fully understand the
specific topic or purpose of our website
Similar to having good meta titles and
descriptions we can vastly improve the way search engines will index our site
if we have h1 tags that reinforce our content
Simply put you can think of h1
tags like being the title of an article and h2 tags are like the sub header of
each section within that article
In this case our page doesn't even have a title
which can be confusing but at the same time it has so many different chapter
titles the search engines might have a hard time understanding our topic
Therefore the search engines are likely to have a hard time
connecting us withour target audience
Now code wise this is a very easy fix
just add this simple line of code
and within that tag you can enter in text that
reinforces the general topic of your page
and bear in mind that you'll want
to follow this principle throughout each page of your site
Now in the early days
of search engine optimization these headings used to be extremely important
but as SEO criteria and algorithms have evolved these headings aren't quite king
of the hill anymore but as you can see they're still very useful and can help
improve your SEO
Just keep in mind that it's best to have only one relevant
unique h1 tag per page
and then avoid being repetitive or your site can look spammy
now there's no hard and fast rule on this so don't sweat it if you feel
like your page is better suited with more than one h1 tag but generally
speaking other SEO marketers have found that having only one h1 tag per page
provides the best results
Then we can also be more thoughtful about how many
times and to what content we should apply the same technique to to create
our h2 tags
Again it's not a steadfast rule but a general rule of thumb is to
have no more than 10 h2 tags on any given page
More than this can be
confusing it can look spammy or or both
so that's it on the coding side
Now let's address the same topic from the perspective of the site visitor
The first of all these heading tags apply a style attribute to whatever text is within the tag
h1 is generally styled to be the largest text on the page
and h2 is styled to be the next largest
But bear in mind that these style attributes
can be modified from within your style sheet to look exactly as you want
now again to improve user experience especially if your site has a lot of
text but even when it doesn't it's usually a great idea to apply these headings
Again think of h1 and h2 tags being like the title and subheaders sections
So in addition to everything I just discussed purely from the
standpoint of a user coming to my site I want them to quickly find what they're looking for
In these tags when they're styled correctly to reinforce
the meaning of the content they help do that
So you can think of these headings in two ways
there's the purely visual aspect or the style and this is
something that web designers often focus on how does something look on the page
But this is not the most important aspect of the heading
The most important aspect of the heading is the meaning
What the text means to the reader in relation to the content
So in terms of SEO you want both of these aspects to
work together the most significant text in terms of
meaning is ideally the most visually significant element on the page
For instance if the visitor is coming to this particular site worried about
dental surgery complications what do I want I want them to find that section
they're looking for as quickly as possible
So headings and their associated style help organise the page
and draw the readers eye to the general topic that interests them
We've all seen sites without these headings
and in these cases the reader is required to do a lot more work to visually find the
content that is relevant to them
So as a consequence my bounce rates will dramatically increase
and that will hurt me both in terms of that specific
visitor and hurt me in the search engine rankings
Admittedly this topic isn't as hot
as it used to be in the early days but as you can see it's still quite
relevant and optimizing your h1 and h2 tags can absolutely strengthen your pages SEO
Feel free to check out our other videos so you can keep fine-tuning
and getting the most out of your SEO and click subscribe to stay updated with new
tips and tricks to get you to the top of the search engine results pages