Information is most easily digested when it is organised into succinct and particular sections. Certain types of media, such as books, deliver text in large blocks that run for thousands of words with a break. But online media, particularly blog articles, tend to break text up every 100 words or so, to help with readability and to let readers and search engines know what the content is about.
In this article, we’ll explain all you need to know about using headings and subheadings for online blog posts.
What Are Headings and Subheadings on a Website?
Headings and subheadings on websites serve two main purposes:
- They indicate to readers where they can find content, and what content each section contains.
- They have SEO value as they tell search engines what the main points of a blog article are.
Almost all blogs have subheadings. There’s one just above: “What Are Headings and Subheadings on a Website?”. Subheadings organise text in a coherent and digestible way, benefitting both readers and writers. There are five categories of subheading when using HTML: H2, H3, H4, H5, and H6. Most articles only use H2 and H3 tags, but subsequent ones can be used for in-depth blogs.
Headings, on the other hand, exist in isolation, with one per post. These are also known as H1 tags, and they are the main title of the blog. They should succinctly explain what the blog is about. For instance: “How to Use Website Headings and Subheadings”.
Blog posts feature one heading, which is the title, explaining what the post is about. Subheadings are used throughout the text to organise information and add SEO value.
Benefits of Blog Headings and Subheadings
Headings and subheadings are basically essential if you want to write online content. Readers expect them and search engines expect them. While in some cases blog formatting can be restrictive, pandering to shallow, short-form content, headings and subheadings do perform meaningful functions.
Providing Structure
As most blogs are informational, and readers will come to them looking for the answer to a question rather than to indulge in a long, in-depth reading experience, subheadings can greatly improve structure by breaking up content into separate, relevant parts.
Fiction and essays can meander between information, with everything entangled, but with a blog, it’s generally preferable to break it up into smaller sections using subheadings, as this allows readers to navigate and extract key information.
Moreover, the structure tells search engines what the blog claims to be about, and therefore can help an article rank higher for a certain search query.
Improving Readability
In a world of short attention spans, breaking content up into small, digestible sections greatly improves readability. And, to be fair, it’s not just to do with attention span.
Reading on screens, especially phones, is more of a strain than reading from paper, and so headings and subheadings can improve the reader experience overall. A single wall of text on a screen can be quite off-putting, even if the same text on a physical page would be totally comfortable.
Improving SEO Ranking
Savvy use of headings and subheadings will improve SEO ranking in various ways.
Aptly named headings contain key words and terms that help readers navigate to your page, and tell search engines what’s happening on your page. Google, for instance, pays slightly more attention to H tags compared to normal text, so it looks to see how relevant they are. If used well, it rewards good subheadings in the form of higher rankings. However, if they are used as vessels for keyword stuffing and spamming, then it will punish this, even more than when used in normal text. With all that said, using keywords appropriately in headings and subheadings is a highly effective SEO tool.
Headings and subheadings are crucial for creating blog articles that both readers and search engines will engage with.
How Do You Use Headings and Subheadings in Articles?
Using headings and subheadings isn’t difficult. In fact, the more intuitively you do it, the better they are likely to work—much like CTAs. If a blog is coherent, then subheadings will emerge from the content. Likewise, if you can use subheadings well, a blog will become even more coherent and well-ordered. If you find yourself struggling to break a text up into clear sections, it may be an indication that the overall idea lacks clarity.
Subheadings appear as large, bold text and often, but not always, contain questions. They help to guide the reader’s eye, attention, and understanding.
When using headings and subheadings, it helps to think in the form of questions. That’s not to say they should always be posed as an interrogative, but they should (most of the time) be easy to transpose as a question. For instance, “How Do You Use Headings and Subheadings in Articles?” could also be written as “All About Headings and Subheadings in Articles”.
Furthermore, it’s worth doing some keyword research to ensure that you’re optimising the SEO effectiveness of each H1 and subheadings. For instance, in this article, we use the terms “headings” and “subheadings” instead of “titles” and “subtitles”, as the former terms are the keywords we’re looking to rank for.
How to Use H1 Headings
As mentioned, a H1 heading is the title of your article, so there is only one of them. As such, it needs to be succinct, clear, and contain the important keywords.
Most H1s take the form of something like:
- How to…
- All about…
- The ultimate guide too…
- Top ten…
- What are…
Of course, they can be anything, but above are the most common examples. Very often, a H1 will be a question, as this is what people are most likely to search, and so questions most effectively match search intent.
But a H1 should fit the article, and not be warped to match search intent if it doesn’t actually fulfil it. Keep it authentic.
How to Use H2 Subheadings
H2s are the most important subheadings, guiding the reader, providing structure, and containing the most important keywords. They break the text up into the major, relevant points. They can be thought of as the main questions, or the main points. An article could get away with just using H2s and still be clear, coherent, and engaging.
H2s can contain anything from around 100 words to around 1,000, depending on the type of article, the target audience, and whether the H2 is broken up into smaller sections, such as H3s. Of course, there is no strict rule, and you should adjust to the demands of the text and your audience—but most articles will follow these guidelines.
How to Use H3 Subheadings
H3s divide H2s into relevant parts, adding mostly to readability and clarity, rather than being essential for structure.
For instance, say you have a H2: “Pros and Cons of…”. You could technically proceed to simply list the pros and cons, and then move onto the next H2. Or, you can break the H2 down into two distinct H3s—one for “Pros” and one for “Cons”.
This is more of a stylistic choice that serves to break up the text, making it more accessible. But it isn’t crucial.
Another, similar way to use H3s is to break down in-depth or complex information. Imagine you have the H2: “A Brief History of China”. Unless it’s extremely brief, a single block of text beneath a H2 is going to still contain quite a lot of information. So you could divide that H2 into H3s such as: “Xia Dynasty”, “Shang Dynasty”, and “Zhou Dynasty”. This, again, helps to break information into more digestible chunks.
How to Use H4, H5, and H6 Subheadings
H4s, 5s, and 6s are helpful for breaking up information into even smaller pieces, but are usually not necessary. Break a text up too much, and it can become incoherent. However, they do still serve a purpose.
For instance, if you had the H2: “Types of Subheadings” and the H3: “About H2 Subheadings”, you could then use a H4 for “Pros of H2 Subheadings” and a H4 for “Cons of H2 Subheadings”.
Similarly, using the second example from above, you could further break up the H3: “Zhou Dynasty” into H4s for the two distinct parts of that period: “Spring and Autumn Period” and “Warring States Period”.
Now, H5 and H6 tags are pretty rare, and you’re unlikely to need them. Depending on the depth and scale of information being presented, they may be beneficial or, in rare cases, necessary. However, for less expansive pieces, these subheadings are best avoided in order to prevent making your content look too sparse and actually decreasing readability.
H tags break information into incrementally more specific sections, and can help with readability and coherence. However, you shouldn’t break information up too much.
Headings: Higher Ranking, Better User Experience
Using headings and subheadings well is a key element of writing high-quality content. Without them, readers and search engines will be at a loss regarding what your content is about or how it’s structured, and will go elsewhere.
The good news is that using headings and subheadings appropriately is pretty easy, and should emerge organically from a coherent idea, all while making an idea more coherent for both the reader and writer.
