If you are like most bloggers, you want your blog to become the “talk of the interne right”, you want to have the email addresses of all those who visited your blog and you want your name to be added beside that of Neil Patel as one of the richest bloggers in the world.

At the same time, you have no doubt learned that success in blogging doesn’t happen by accident or wishful thinking.

They increase just as you put in more effort in your blog. And a good part of that effort should be invested in crafting a high quality content that your readers and the search engines are sure to love.

Now, this is where it gets interesting…

So, now that you have known that your content is the trump card that determines how far that you and your content go in the internet landscape, you went ahead and created what most bloggers call ” the epic content”.

An hour after your best piece ever went live, you logged in to your website dashboard to see how many eyeballs had fell on it, you checked the share stats, and you even did a quick search on Google to see whether it had occupied the “top spot”.

And quite surprisingly, all you see is nothing, nil, nadda.
Even after one week, the statistics of the article is not something that could make you to pop champagne.

Isn’t that frustrating?

At this juncture, most people who thought that blogging is a ” get rich quick scheme” throw up their hands in the air and give up.

However, some others with a very persistent spirit sit down, go back to the drawing board and ask themselves some necessary questions. For those kind of people, the first question which you should ask yourself is “What am I doing wrong?

While the answer to that question isn’t straightforward, there are couple of things that you should know…

Blogging requires a good deal of technical knowledge so that you can be able to control what happens at the back end of your website.
A lot of this information is contained on this blog.

In this blog post, I am going to outline a list of things that you should know about header tags.

Don’t scratch your head about the word ” header tags ” because I am going to explain that below.

With the proper implementation of the header tags as you’ll learn here, your search engine traffic will instantly skyrocket. This is because the search engine bots will begin to properly understand how your article is structured.

Here we go.

1. What is a Header Tag?

A header tag is a HTML or call it Hyper text mark up language, a computer language used in describing the structure of web pages.

When it comes to blogging, an html element is used to indicate the beginning of web documents. Most people also refer to it as the h tag.

There are six types of header tags h1, h2, h3, h4, h5 and h6. Each of these heading elements are used to denote different sections of a web page according to how important they are.

The most important section of an article is shown with the h1. And most times, this refers to the main topic of the page.

On the other hand, the least important section on a page is shown with h6.

If you make out time to put this into practice, you will discover that texts that had been marked up with h1 tags appear bigger when viewed with a browser.

h2 appears smaller than h1. They continue to decrease in size till the h6 which is the smallest of them all.

2. How can You Apply This To Your Website?

Within a very short period of time, the internet has grown and changed in different ways. These growths and changes is quite noticeable on the way websites are designed and blog posts are written.

There has been a swift exodus from the use of FTPs (File Transfer Protocol) to the use of CMS (Content Management Systems).

Content Management Systems are web tools or wizards which are designed to simplify the process of creating a website or a blog.

If you have a good CMS, you can get your website or blog up and running in less than 10 minutes.

Examples of CMS include WordPress, blogger, tumblr, wix, weebly, e.t.c.

You can add the header tags without breaking a sweat if you are using a CMS. This is as a result of the fact that CMS platforms always have an improved WYSIWYG editor which lets you to customize your website without touching a single code (if you choose not to).

On the other hand, if you are one of the few people that still make use of FTP to update your website, it is important that you know a few basic things about HTML codes.

Knowing this will enable you not to mess up with the codes of your website.

For instance, you should ensure that HTML tags are properly closed on each of your web pages before uploading them.

Failure to do that will make the browsers unable to properly interpret the code and render it in a reader friendly format.

The final result will be a poor and code clogged blog post that confuses everyone – including the search engines.

In order to apply header tags to your website easily, it is advisable that you make use of a CMS platform. Not only will it make you more efficient, it will also make your blog to be well formatted.

3. What Impact Does Header Tags Have on SEO (Search Engine Optimization)?

Every blogger who dreams of getting in the limelight one day knows how important that search engines are in helping to actualize that dream.

As a result, almost all the bloggers make out time to check the nuts and bolts of each web page to make sure that it is what search engines will love.

As it turns out, header tags are one of the the things that one should look out for.

Some bloggers think that search engines have passed the stage where they need the contents on a page need to be marked up for them to understand what it is talking about.

While I agree to the fact that Google and its likes are getting smarter with each passing day, I do like to stick to what has been proved to be a positive ranking factor in the past instead of doing nothing.

And according to my research on the websites ranking on Google for highly competitive keywords, all of them had heading HTML elements.

At this juncture, I have to talk about how to increase your blog traffic with header tags.

The first thing that you should know about this is that h1
should be on every single page that you create on your website.

The contents of your h1 tag is what tells the search engines what the topic of your blog post is about.

It might sound so trivial at first until you realize that about 50% of blogs belonging to newbies are missing this tag on their blog posts.

The reason for this could be because of the usage of premade website templates.

So, if you are using a website template that you downloaded from somewhere on the internet, make sure that it contains h1 tags on each of your posts after installing it.

The best way to do that is to view the html source code of one your posts. To do that, use a keyboard shortcut for Chrome (Mac): CMD + Option + u .

Find the h1 on the page by pressing Ctrl + F. Type in “h1” into the search box that will pop up.

Once you do that, all the tags that are h1 will be highlighted. Most times, if a h1 tag is missing, some search engines will use the h2 tag as the title of the post, when that happens, you are not giving your blog the best optimization that it could possibly get.

If you cannot find the h1 tags when you must have viewed the source code, then it’s time that you need to call your developer or web designer to fix that.

Another thing that you should look out for is that the web page doesn’t contain more than one h1.Having multiple h1 on a page is not a good search engine optimization strategy.

To show the different parts of the body of an article, it is advisable to use h2 and h3. I personally prefer to use h3 on my posts. Most times, I don’t use it at all when the word count of the article is not too big.

Always have it in mind that the purpose of this tag is to ensure that your content is separated to sections. As you add those tags, try to sprinkle your LSI keywords inside the contents.

Don’t mistake this for keyword stuffing. Excessive usage of keywords in the header tags of your blog posts will certainly get you penalised. Try to be be natural as much as possible.

The number of h2 or h3 of your blog posts should vary according to the number of sections that it has. No case study had proved that using more h2 or h3 header tags helps or positively affects rankings.

4. Conclusion
If you’ve read this article, you now know more about header tags than most people on the internet.

All that you are expected to do right now is to take action, revamp your site and fix all the missing or multiple tags than you can find.

Once you have taken proper care of that, you will begin to see the huge impact that it will have on your rankings. Increased rankings will get more eyeballs on your website. More eyeballs mean more more money for your pocket.

This post was written by Lawrence Ozeh. Blogger and founder tokohow.com. You can also read more posts from Lawrence like this one below…

How to Remove Blog Name From Blog Post Title

Victor Winners.

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Victor Winners

Victor Winners

Award winning Blogger, Author, Web Developer, Senior Digital Strategist and Founder of Africa's most widely read blog on Content Marketing and Digital Strategy, VictorWinners.Com.Named as one of the top 50 design influencers globally, since 2014; Victor Winners has helped over 2 million readers to understand and use digital technology to transform their lives and businesses.

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