Much like a young toddler telling a story and you aren’t sure what the point is, long pages of paragraph after paragraph kind of have that same effect on people. Where is this going? What’s the point? But unlike being patient with a toddler, people will not care about your feelings. They’ll leave your site if they don’t find it helpful or entertaining.
What’s good for the user is good for Google. In fact, Google states this many times and lists their philosophy points here. Their number one is “Focus on the user and all else will follow.” So it should follow that making your content easier to read and understand by your site visitor = content that Google can appreciate.
How to Make Your Content Easier to Understand
Use header tags to give your reader clues about what’s happening and break the content into sections that make it easier to scan and understand. Using header tags gives sections their own little headers that look different than the rest of the text.
What is a header tag?
The actual tag is an HTML code wrapped around the headline text. But don’t fret, you don’t need to know the code if you are using a page editor like WordPress or any other worthy website builder
Take WordPress for example. As you are writing your content you can select a block of text and then transform that section to a header instead of a basic paragraph by making a couple of clicks. This change will now let Google bots know that it is a headline as well as displaying the text in a different style so the user can more easily see that it is a new section.
Cascade Your Headers
When you’re writing, it can be helpful to think of the article as a hierarchy. The main points should be your headers then the supporting text is a paragraph. If you need to expand further use subtopics. An example of the hierarchy is below. You don’t need to indent the sections in your actual content like in the example. That’s just so you can wrap your head around the hierarchy.
It’s best practice to use headers in their numeric order. The title of your article should be the H1 tag. That is usually done automatically but will depend on your editor or website theme. Then the secondary headers should be the H2 tags. If that section needs additional support then put it more supporting H3 tags with supporting text along with it.
How long should website headers be?
Short enough to get the point across but long enough to understand. 😉 There is no rule but that’s the general guideline. Don’t wrap a whole paragraph in a header tag. Make it short and to the point.
Tag, you’re it.
How are your header tags measuring up? Comment and link to your post so we can take a look.