When Google crawls a website, it looks through to recognize your content and it’s structure.
It reads your page titles, your page headings, and the content that compliments it — to help better understand what your website is about, so it can properly show it in the appropriate search results.
Because of this, you have to pay close attention to how you’re structuring your page content on your website — and not just by “design”.
There is a very specific way of doing so, and it resembles a Table of Contents like you see in a book — a hierarchical order of headings, that help you understand the content.
You have chapters, their titles, and sections in each chapter that divide up the content.
Before you even begin building your website, you should write your copy — and structure the copy in your doc just like it should be on the website.
This means you should have:
- H1 heading: A single H1 per page used to indicate the page title
- H2 headings: For secondary headings, or “sections” of your content on a page
- H3 headings: To be used as third-tier headings, underneath H2’s.
- H4 headings: Fourth-tier headings, to be used under H3’s.
- H5 & H6 headings: Follow suit as above, nested under their respective heading.
As an example, here’s the structure you’ll find on my service page:
<H1> Website Design & Development
<H2> Start Getting Noticed Online
<H3> Website Maintenance
<H2> Our Websites Deliver
<H3> Creative
<H3> Functional
<H3> Goal-Oriented
<H2> Getting Started is Easy
<H3> Fill out our inquiry form
<H3> Receive a custom proposal
<H3> Plan & execute your project
As you can see, the structure of the headings looks like an outline — with nested sections in one another.
No H2’s under H3’s, or multiple H1’s — and this is imperative to helping Google understand your content on your website.
Now, don’t do this…
Now the biggest mistake we see many people make, is choosing a certain heading just to make it “appear” bigger.
Such as, choosing an H2 heading, when in fact it should be an H3 — and this may look OK on the front end, however when Google is reading it (or even screen readers), your content is completely out of order and not able to be crawled properly.
How you approach your headings should heavily rely on the HTML and hierarchy — not the design.
And if you need an H3 to look like an H2, then style it that way — don’t just choose the H2 for looks.
It’s a part of website building that isn’t often considered, but single-handedly can cause your website to be misread and not crawled for search results.
Beyond that, you should always create a hierarchy in the way your headings are represented — H1’s should be a much larger font size than that of an H4, for example.
It’s the pairing of proper coding, as well as design, that helps your website be Google-friendly AND optimized for scanning by users.
Have any questions about proper headings and hierarchy? You can always hit reply, I’m happy to help!
See you next time,
