Background on Heading Tags for SEO

How to Use Heading Elements?

Background on Heading Tags for SEO

In the early 2000s, heading elements (H1, H2, H3) were actual ranking factors. It was mandatory to add your keywords in the headings if you wanted to rank.
But that’s not been the case for many years. Yet, it is a common SEO practice to worry about keywords in the heading tags.
The word “rote” means doing something mechanically and out of habit, without thinking about it. Adding keywords to headings tags has become a rote SEO practice. It’s done not because it’s useful but because it’s a habit. Take a look at the top ranked sites for most any query and it’s highly likely you won’t see sites seeding heading tags with keywords.

The Right Way to Use Heading Tags

What John Mueller takes time to explain is that heading tags are are useful for explaining what the text is about, which is the purpose of heading tags.

This is how Mueller explains it:

But rather, what we use these headings for is well we have this big chunk of text or we have this big image and there’s a heading above that, therefore maybe this heading applies to this chunk of text or to this image.
So it’s not so much like there are five keywords in these headings, therefore this page will rank for these keywords but more, here’s some more information about that piece of text or about that image on that page.
And that helps us to better understand how to kind of frame that piece of text, how to frame the images that you have within those blocks. And with that it’s a lot easier to find… the right queries that lead us to these pages.

Heading Tags No Longer Ranking Factors?

Heading tags have made the top ten lists of ranking factors for several decades. But if you look at the search engine results pages (SERPs) you’ll see that’s not the case. Anyone who argues otherwise is denying what exists in front of their eyes.
The proper use of heading tags has changed. The proper use is to help search engines understand what the content is about. That’s it.
Mueller explains that keywords in headings are not required for ranking:

So it’s not so much that suddenly your page ranks higher because you have those keywords there. But suddenly it’s more well Google understands my content a little bit better and therefore it can send users who are explicitly looking for my content a little bit more towards my page.

Mueller then returns to explaining the proper use of heading tags:

“So obviously there’s a little bit of overlap there with regards to… Google understanding my content better and me ranking better for the queries that I care about. Because if you write about content that you want to rank for which probably you’re doing, then being able to understand that content better does help us a little bit.
But it’s not that suddenly your page will rank number one for competitive queries just because you’re making it very easy for Google to understand your content.
So with that said, I think it’s useful to… look at the individual headings on a page but… don’t get too dug down into all of these details and variations and instead try to find a way to make it easy for people and for scripts to understand the content and kind of the context of things on your pages.

Article Source From - https://www.searchenginejournal.com/heading-tags-for-seo/341817