At Advanta Advertising, we understand the confusion that may arise when using htags, in terms of styling and SEO.

What is an htag?

Htags are coding to provide a hierarchy of importance for the text on your website page. They can be styled in any manner, but are most often used to visually show importance in content and draw the eye. They are vital in teaching search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo! what keywords are most important to return your website in search results.

How to use htags

A good htag structure mimics that of a term paper, clearly defining the main subject and important headings and subheadings. It can surround one or more words in a keyworded phrase.

For instance, if your website page’s subject was Earth, that keyword or a keyworded phrase with “Earth” in it would be the h1 tag. Breaking down the Earth into continents would give you h2 tags, countries would be h3, and so on, until you reached your town which might end up as your h6 tag. This outline of information will not only help your users visually recognize each keyword’s importance, but will also help search engines, like Google, Bing, and Yahoo!, decipher the information, thus ranking you higher in search results.

Htags and styling

Now that we’ve identified our structure, we need to style the htags to establish a visual hierarchy. Styling the content by changing the font, size, weight, and color will help distinguish the htags and allow users to access the information easily. When creating your styling, try to think of the project as a whole. If there is a need for varying the styles, think about making separate styles for each page. This will help minimize the amount of class styling a programmer will have to do later and hopefully save time in production. It should also limit inline styling, which helps lessen page loading time.

Htag hierarchy means no “mix and match”

After the coding hierarchy (the content “outline”) and styling are complete, you’ll want to make sure it is initiated properly. Make sure the hierarchy stays intact. An h1 is so important, it should only appear once on a page. Do not nest a h2 tag with h3 tags and don’t skip over htags (h1 to h3, skipping h2).

Another thing to consider is the focus of the page. Going back to the example, on the home page, your focus and h1 tag would be “Earth”, but as you go deeper into the site, your focus moves off of the Earth and onto its parts (i.e., North America, USA).

More questions?

Advanta Advertising has excellent SEO expertise and a proven record with using htag structure with appropriate keywording to help our clients’ website pages move up in search engine results pages (SERPs). Call us! We’re happy to review your site and provide recommendations.