The hierarchy of headings h1, h2, h3 and others is one of the factors in the ranking for Google search. No matter you are doing Wordpress site or ecommerce, you need to learn what the correct hierarchy looks like, and how to do it wrong.
On the one hand, a web page is text and pictures, but on the other hand, it is also an html document that has structure. Actually, the headings are a reflection of the structure of the html document, which helps the search engine robot to navigate the text.
First, there is only one h1 heading in your text: this is the title of your article and there cannot be other h1s. It's crucial. The further structure of the article may look different. For example, in this way:
That is, in the example above, you see two h2 headings following each other and then three h3 headings. Or another possible option:
That is when you have multiple h2 headings followed and the h3 heading closes the text structure. Sometimes the hierarchy looks like this:
You can see the h4 heading appears. However, it is important to remember that the headings h4, h5 and h6 have practically no weight and do not affect an html document. The main headers you need to use are h1, h2 and h3. You may use h4, h5, h6, but this is not required.
Sometimes the structure might look like this:
The above example is essentially a classic. Our theme has a title, for example two ways to do things. In h3, you open up both ways. Looks logical and helps the user navigate the text.
The most important rule, which is better not to ignore: you cannot jump over tags. For example, if you put the heading h2, then the next one cannot be h4 in any way - you are jumping over h3. Let's take a look at some examples.
As you can see, we have h4, but it is surrounded by h2 headers. If there was a h3 heading here, then everything would be fine. It is not advisable to do the following:
Yes, from a very formal point of view, it may seem that the structure is not broken - only h1 and h2. But this is not enough. H3 is missing. The heading hierarchy looks noticeably better when you use h1, h2 and h3 in the same html document.
But what happens if you use wrong headings tags? Well, it doesn’t mean you failed search engine optimization process. No, an article can even go to the top of the search results even with the wrong hierarchy of headings. Of course, if it contains content that is really interesting and users share it online.
The correct hierarchy of heading tags is an advantage. It small plus for SEO of your site. However, if you pay attention to such small advantages, then you will get a very good result compared to competitors in long-time perspective.
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