In this article, we are going to talk about the importance of headings in our content for SEO. So we will talk about why these headings are important, how you should add them on your content.
And we will also cover the latest update from Google regarding the use of headings. So we will cover all that in this article.
So when you are using a WordPress website and when you start writing any blog post or any page, you get an option to enter the title of that post or for that page. And most of the WordPress theme show that title in the front end under H1 One tag.
Now we all know that we should only use the H1 tag only once on our web content so that the search engines can easily recognize that this is the H1 tag and whatever written under that heading is the main title of that content.
And as a best practice of readability, when we write our content, we break them into various subheadings and for that, we divide the content using various H two Tags as the subheadings or subtitles so that we can cover various long-tail keywords under those headings which are relevant for that piece of content.
Once we are done with the writing part of our content, most of us use one or the other SEO tool which we use to generate the meter title for our blog post or for our web page.
And the motive of doing that is to get that exact title in the search engine results. And for that, most of the time we try to enter our focus on the target keyword inside that meta title.
That is actually one of the steps to get those green signs from the search engine tools. But there are two issues with that.
- One that many times search engine ranks those websites which are not even using the focus keyword in the title or maybe in the meta title and the website are still ranking in the number one spot.
- Latest Google update which says that these meta titles might lose their relevance because Google will use any part of your content as the title to show in the search engine results.
So this update was released on August 24, 2021 and it’s solely focused on how Google generates the title of web pages and it laid out various points about how Google is going to generate the title for any post to show in the search engine results.
So if Google might not take the meta title, then what else? It will take. So these are the points that are mentioned in this release that Google Now can use
H1 tag of your content as your meta title, or maybe any other subheading that you have written in H two, H Three or various other heading Tags anywhere on your content.
Along with that, it can also use any highlighted text on your content. It means that when you use the bold, italics or underline in your content, make sure you use them wisely because they might end up in the search engine result as your website meta title.
And after that they can also use anchor text as your website title. And that makes complete sense because in the previous article where we covered about internal links, we mentioned about how you should not link one page to another by using your focus keyword.
So this is very clear from here that whatever text you use on the page to maybe link any internal or external source, use that text wisely because that might be used by Google to create your metal title in search engine results.
And in the same way last, they can use the alt attribute for images that you have used in your web content. Now this doesn’t mean that the meta title these SEO plugins help you enter will completely vanish. But it is surely going to make a big difference because in the release it clearly says that right now they are not using this technique for all the web results, but they are using this for 80% of the results and that’s a big number.
So now the question is what could be that scenario where Google can change your meta title or SEO title for your blog or for your web page?
Table of Contents
1. If Its Too Long
If your SEO title is way too long and that’s actually obvious. If you enter a very long title it will automatically lose its relevance.
2. If You Stuff Keywords Too Much.
when you stuff keywords too much. And once again it’s a very common practice that people tend to stuff keywords in their meta title and they think that this will get them ranked in search engine results. But that’s not true and now it is validated by the recent Google update as well.
3. For Default Title Pages.
Now there are various times when we create a page on our website like home services, contact us, Privacy policies, and terms and conditions and we never gave them a metal title. So instead of listing untitled pages in search engine results, Google will crawl your content and generate a relevant title for that.
4. Your Title Is Misleading.
You should focus on the search intent and the content relevancy with this user search intent and you should not concentrate too much on the exact keyword match
while writing your content or entering any meta information in any SEO tool and that’s again verified by this recent Google update that if you try to manipulate the meta heading to get higher ranking in search engine results then obviously Google is smart enough to understand that this is a misleading heading.
The content is nowhere related to this title and in that case Google can rewrite your SEO title to show different in the search engine results. So the key takeaway from this update is that make sure you write relevant content and focus on user search intent instead of targeting the exact keyword match in your content or maybe in the titles or meta titles of your website.
And once you start focusing on writing relevant content with relevant headings then automatically every Google algorithm will start working for you.
So that’s it for this one and I’ll see you in the next article.