Headers to Enhance Searchability & Scannability

Many bloggers make the mistake of writing posts that are too short. The popularity of microblogging services like Twitter, and Internet users’ short attention spans have made us hungry for information, and yet unable to stick to reading one page for more than 30 seconds.

However, still a lot of other bloggers make the mistake of writing posts that are too long. Sure, long posts may contain a lot of useful information. But who really reads posts that look like term papers? Personally, my attention span can only stand about three paragraphs or so. Then, I usually just skip to the end, or scan for keywords.

But here’s something that can help: headers. They’re friendly to both people and search engines. Headers can be used to make important points on your post stand out. Enclosing text in <h2></h2> or <h3></h3> highlights your text in bigger, bolder letters.

Headers help readers scan for important points

Human eyes have a knack for sighting text that stands out. Hence, you should take the opportunity to organize your blog posts according to the important points. This way, readers who have short attention spans (meaning most of us) can more easily scan through your content. Now they won’t get lost in the maze of words. If they see a word or phrase that catches their attention, then they can just head on to that particular heading and paragraph.

Headers help you organize your thoughts

Another mistake of bloggers is to ramble on and on about all sorts of stuff that are mostly unassociated. And so readers get lost in your train of thought. Smart bloggers organize their articles, and one way you can do this is by using headers. This helps you keep your paragraphs cohesive and coherent, as each main idea is organized under its own header.

Headers help search engines scan for important keywords

Headers also increase your blog’s search engine optimization by helping search bots identify the important keywords and key phrases on your posts. Crawlers sent by Google, Yahoo! and other search engines usually get relevant keywords from a webpage’s title, meta data, and headers.

Also, importance of keywords are ranked according to hierarchy. So headers under <h1></h1> are more important than those under <h2></h2>, and so forth. On most blog design templates, the post title is enclosed in <h1></h1> tags. And so designers usually use either the H2 or H3 tag to identify important points in the body text.

In conclusion, a lot of bloggers are overly concerned about optimizing their blogs for search engines. However, one of the best ways to do SEO is to give more importance to human readers rather than the machine. This means using relevant headlines, and using headers to organize according to important points. Try spicing up your posts with headers, and see how your readers will appreciate it.