Optimising Heading Structure

Headings and subheadings are more important to search engines, such as Google, for evaluating your site than regular blocks of text. Headings H1 to H6 are ranked in the source text after formatting. Headings give your texts a hierarchical structure and help your visitors find their way around your site more easily.

Your texts are best organised and structured with headings H1 to H6. It is very important that the HTML tags <h1> to <h6> are used correctly for a correct heading structure. Heading levels H1 to H3 are the most relevant to search engines. By contrast, headings H4 to H6 do not play a major role in ranking your site and are rarely used. Of course, there are no disadvantages to using headings H4 to H6 if you need them.

Tip: Be mindful not to use images of text as headings.

Nesting Headings Correctly

Texts that are well organised are easier to grasp for search engines in terms of content, as well as for your visitors. Headline H1 is the main heading of an individual page. That's why H1 should occur first on every page and only once. Headings H2 to H6 are meant to be subheadings which further organise your content. For a correct structure, all headings must be numerically arranged one below the other. For example, heading H1 can be followed directly by two paragraphs with  heading H2, but not with heading H3.

Formatting Headings

The different weighting of the headlines is typically also made clear by their size. If you format your headings via CSS or a website builder, you should also include weighting by size. You should visually design your headings in such a way that their structure and importance are clearly visible to human readers.