SEO: Search Engine Optimization Bible

That heading hierarchy reads like this:

H1: (Page Topic) Losing Sleep Over Poor Sleep Habits?

H2: (Main Topic) Your Mattress Could Keep You Awake

H3: (Sub Topic) Too Firm?

H3: (Sub Topic) Too Soft?

H2: (Main Topic) Choosing the Right Mattress.

Headings on a web page behave the same way that headings on a page behave. They denote important

information, and best of all, on a web page, they give you an opportunity to use your most important

keywords in a contextually appropriate manner. Most specifically, search engine crawlers take into

consideration the text within a header tag and how it fits with the body text around it (which is dis-

cussed in the next section). Again, looking at the different levels of headings, first-level headings then

should contain the most important keywords on your web page, assuming they can be used naturally

within the heading.

It’s important to make that distinction — keywords should work in your headings. If they don’t,

avoid using them. It’s okay to include headings that contain no keywords at all. What’s most impor-

tant is that the headers help readers to easily read the content in which the headings are included.

So if you’re using your most important keywords in level-one headings, lower-level headings (levels

two through six) should contain decreasingly important keywords.

Don’t fall for the assumption that because level-one headings contain your most important keywords,

you should use them all over your web pages. It doesn’t work that way. Most SEOs and web-design

experts will tell you that you shouldn’t use a level-one heading on your web page more than one

time. Using it more could cause a search crawler to decide that you’re spamming the search engine,

which will result in lowered rankings and might even cause your web site to be delisted from search

results entirely.

The heading tags are similar in format to other tags that you’ve examined to this point:

<H1>Header 1</H1>

<H2>Header 2</H2>

<H3>Header 3</H3>

<H4>Header 4</H4>

<H5>Header 5</H5>

<H6>Header 6</H6>

Header tags should be included immediately before the body-text tags of your site, and the text of

the header goes in between the opening and closing tags. These are automatically sized headings,

though you can change the size of the headings using Cascading Style Sheets (CSS).Cascading Style

Sheets are a language that allows you to create your web site using a specific style. For example, in

some programs you can create a web site using a preset theme. This theme usually contains all of

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