Use Headings in a Blog Post for Better SEO and UX

How to Use Headings in a Blog Post for Better SEO and UX

Headings play a very important role in structuring your writings. Whether you are writing an academic paper, an official document, a journal, a blog, or a book, headings are the hidden impressionist which makes your writings attractive and interesting for the readers. Headings are used to cutting a long piece of text into easily readable sections. Imagine them as the personal titles of each section.

Headings are extremely useful for users to read and understand your text. Moreover, the search engines (like Google, Bing, or Yahoo) takes your headings or headers as a decisive factor for the rank of your page.

For readers, they act as an outline of an entire post helping them to figure out what are the topics discussed in the post. Headings are also helpful to skip directly to the section which is close to what a reader is really looking for.

I will give you some pointers on how to use headings effectively to improve the structure of your content to make it more appealing, engaging, and SEO friendly.

The Main Purpose of Headings and Subheadings in a Blog Post

The purpose of Headings and subheadings is to divide the long text into sections that are easy for readers to digest like having an outline of your entire blog post which helps users to navigate easily and quickly to the text section they want to read. The table of contents contains each heading in from your post, in proper order. Headings also keep your work neat. Organized and SEO friendly.

Headings in a Blog Post Convey in Short

Generally, there are two most used ways to write headings:

1. Root Headings and
2. Fruit Headings

Root Headings

Write the core point as a heading and then describe it in the following paragraph or paragraphs. Root headings read out the core point and the following paragraphs elaborate it, describing its process, reason, cause, effect, or any other detail. Root headings are used extensively in how-to and review articles. It is also the traditional way of writing headings.

With this type of headings, it is nice and quick for the readers to grasp what you have to say and the user engagement and the UX of your page goes better.

Meanwhile, it is not a necessity to use this templet for your headings and subheadings in every blog post. If it is too straight to the point, it can actually reduce your on-page time which is not good from the SEO point of view.

Here, the above example uses a Root Heading, which means that the heading is the root point and the paragraphs are to just describe – how to. For this type of headings, a reader can simply read the heading, understand, and move to the next one.

The given post is about the “strategies to learn English pronunciation” and the heading in the example is one of the strategies.

Straight to the point, right? If you are intelligent or don’t have time to read the details, you can move on to the next strategy.

Fruit Headings

Write a stimulating statement which encourages users to read further for more (although, the heading should be in the context of your main topic). I call this the Fruit Heading because it shows the fruit to the readers and attracts them to read more to know what the roots of the topic are. You don’t get any exact idea of what to expect, from the heading itself, but you are excited enough to read further for the details.

Fruit headings are mostly used as titles or headers for news, YouTube video titles or explanatory blogs so as to encourage users to spend time reading or watching their content. This style is the Social Media Strategy or the New Age The strategy of the content creators so to increase the engagement rate. This works extremely well attracting more users, readers, or viewers.

But if the users don’t find anything interesting but the heading, this technique could go unexpectedly wrong, and the bounce-back rate of your page increases dramatically which turns down your SEO score.

Here, in the above example, the heading is standalone, which means that the heading is the core and the paragraphs describe it in detail. For this type of headings, a reader can simply read the heading, understand, and move to the next one.

The given post is about the “strategies to learn English pronunciation” and the heading in the example is one of the strategies. Straight to the point, right? If you are intelligent or don’t have time to read the details, you can move on to the next strategy.

Both of these ways are used extensively nowadays. But the caution note here is that you should use the appropriate style keeping in mind what is the type of your content (formal, informal, or official) and what is your audience type. Also, keep in mind that the first sentences of your paragraph should contain the most important information than the following sentences. This helps in boosting the SEO and the readers are also fulfilled.

Headings in a Blog Post Improves Accessibility, Navigations, and SEO

New Google algorithms are now focusing more and more on the developer ease, accessibility features, and the mobile user experience. So, if you, as a blogger or a writer, also focus on these three areas then your SEO rank will automatically boost up.

The content on the web is mostly in the HTML language and any screen reader app or the extension has access to these headings/headers. These apps and the extensions read out loud the tags and the structure of the post to help those who are visibly impaired or finds it difficult to read from the screen.

These people, while listening to the blog post through the screen reader app, can decide which heading to jump to and whether to continue to listen or not. Headings are also used as jumpers in the screen reader apps and extensions.

When a user visits your blog page and if he is satisfied, Google can calculate this through approx. 200 different parameters conclude that your page helps users and then it increases your SEO score and rank up your page. If the readers leave your page quickly, it increases your bounce-back rate and Google can conclude that your page has no sufficient information for the user’s searched query, and your SEO ranking decreases.

You should always structure your post keeping the user first in your mind because if the user can understand your content easily, it will indirectly help Google to conclude what SEO score your content should get.

What is the Best Way to Use Headings in a Blog Post?

Correct Structuring of the Headings in a Blog

Keeping the structure of the headings correct is very important and beneficial, too, from SEO perspective. Whether in WordPress, blogger, or in HTML language, you might have seen the headers (Heading 1, Heading 2, Heading 3,...) or the heading tags (<h1>, <h2>, <h3>,...). These are the headings with their respective size and importance.

The heading 1 or the tag h1 has the highest importance. In WordPress, heading 1 can be used only once and the title of the blog post is automatically given h1. Then the h2 or the heading 2 can be used as all the major headings in the blog post. After that, if the section of h2 needs to be split in further section, h3 is given. You can use heading 1 to heading 6 but, in most cases, the heading structure doesn’t further than h4.

Also, keep in mind that unnecessary stuffing of headings in a blog post to fool the search engine, will not work and may result in lowering the ranking of your web page.

It is said by Yoast Plugin in WordPress that if a section under the heading exceeds 300 words, you shall include another heading there. This works as a medicine for the SEO.

Headings in a Blog Post should contain the Keyword

Headings are one of the best place to insert your focused/main keyword or keywords. This is because the headings, in the backend, are the HTML tags which every search engines reads to conclude weather your content is related to what a user has searched for.

So, when the search engine bots crawls your webpage, it goes through the headings first and then the content. If both (headings and the content under it) have the keywords you are trying to rank for, Google thinks that might be a useful and appropriate content related to those keywords.

Also, you can use the synonyms and other words which are closely related or are in trend with your main keyword. That can give you an extra benefits in boosting your SEO and page visibility. Google algorithm checks for 200+ parameters to decide if your blog page is worth to be shown in the first page of the search results. Headings, subheadings, and keywords are just a speck in SEO (Search Engine Optimization).

Use Related Words and Synonyms of Keywords in Headings

Not only the main keyword is important, but the synonyms and related words to your focused keyword are similarly important. You may be familiar with related searches column in Google search page. Google shows the related searches for what you search. This is one of the most important aspect of Google algorithm.

Google checks your article for the keywords and queries related to your focused keyword. This is how Google can conclude if your article is more or less informative in relation to your main topic.

When you use more keywords and synonyms related to to your blog title, it is likely to be more informative then just point to point description and definition.

For this, you can include definitions, facts, history, controversies, theories, conclusion, undergoing and upcoming factors, related to your main topic. By this you can increase the informative content in your article and not just stuffing hundreds of different words to increase the length of your blog post.

Conclusion: Check the headings in a blog post of your website

Using headings efficiently in blog is helpful for your users. It increases the chances that the reader would read the post with ease and actual interest. Proper headings also improves the accessibility, navigation, SEO, and your overall user experience (UX) of your blog page.

Use headings wisely and make sure that you structure them properly so not only your readers but also the Google algorithm can find it useful and eligible to rank on Google Search page 1.

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