Downtempo LLC: Our Fantastic Blog

With the amount of CSS formatting that occurs on most pages now, it’s easy to apply your own styles to <span> and <div> tags, and neglect the humble heading tags <h1 – h6> that have been with us since the early days of HTML.

Web standards issues aside, one key reason to keep using the heading tags is to optimize your page to be a search engine crawlable as possible. The Trif3cta blog has an excellent article on how to apply page heading tags for SEO, which reviews a series of cases on how to apply page heading tags to a webpage. I highly recommend reading this article in detail for suggestions on how to handle different cases where you’d need to use page heading tags.

A few key points to keep in mind:

• Use <h1> for the main content title on your page (ie. for your homepage, your site name is the <h1> content. For your news section page, the news section page title would be the <h1> content. And for a news article, the article title would be the <h1> content.)
• Use <h2>, <h3>, and so forth, to call out logical subheadings on a page.
• Try to only use <h1> once a page.
• Don’t skip header levels (ie. don’t only have <h1> and <h3> tags on a page without any <h2> tags).