Headings Are Important
Search engines use the headings to index the structure and content of your web pages.
Users skim your pages by its headings. It is important to use headings to show the document structure.
<h1>
headings should be used for main headings, followed by<h2>
headings, then the less important<h3>
, and so on.
Use HTML Headings To Improve Your Website
Most things written on paper or from a keyboard benefit from having some kind of title. Sub-headings further help to divide up content into more organized chunks that support the main title.
In the world of web design and development, we use:
h1, h2, h3, h4, h5 and h6 to identify headings.
For most real world webpages, an h1 heading represents the page's or article's title. So normally there is one h1 heading on a webpage (using best practices), just as we would use a single title for most written documents.
Then, we divide up our webpage content into sections using sub-headings or h2-h6 headings.
Although a web browser will normally display these headings in a way that clearly identifies them as such by default, often bold and with spacing around them, we web ninjas prefer to create our own look for them. So we use something called CSS to alter the heading styles or look.
Free Tip
Contribute to a pleasant reading experience for your website visitors as well as good SEO practice by using h1 – h6 headings.
Use Markdown syntax if you write content, but turn it over to someone else for translation to HTML.
It's easy.
Just write content in any text editor and add headings using hashtags (#).
# This is an h1 heading
## This is an h2 heading
### This is an h3 heading
In Markdown, a heading is a line of text preceded by one or more # symbols. The more # symbols used, the less important the heading.
Your web developer will understand the appropriate HTML markup to use and there will likely be less of a chance for confusion or miscommunication. If you write your content in a word processing application (think Google Documents, Microsoft Word or Apple Pages), the pretty formatting doesn't carry over to the language of the web which relies on plain text (meaning no pretty formatting or rich-text).
So when you express your desire to make your website well structured and provide content to your website developer with Markdown syntax, good things will happen — improved readability and good SEO.