Some Queries regarding <H tags?

[Evan_Jose]

Hey webmasters, i'm Evan. I'm here again because i have a new doubt and i'm confused with the use of <heading tag> while submitting an article on my own sites. I heard from someone that it's compulsory to use <heading tag> when submitting any article. I want to know it's truth or not. And i also want to know that can i use multiple headings in one article like h1, h2, h3, h4...? and is it recommended to use heading tags in sequence?

[not2easy]

Mozilla Developers [developer.mozilla.org] site offers a nice, easy to use learning interface to help you completely understand the "what" and "why" and "how" of these things. The <h tags are header or headline tags. They do have a valid purpose and they do help you organize the content of a page to be better understood by people and bots.

In general, "compulsory" is a strong term and I would say "recommended' is more accurate, but if you lack an understanding for proper usage of the heading tags, it can be better not to use them. Their purpose is to help organize the content of a page, to make it easier for people to sort through and understand the overall subject. The heading tags should be a quick guide to how your topic is organized.

[lucy24]

And i also want to know that can i use multiple headings in one article like h1, h2, h3, h4...?

You shouldn't have more than one h1 on a page. (For arcane historical reasons, most of my pages start at h2 with no h1 at all; this single factor by itself can't possibly be enough to destroy SEO.) In general, think of it as a pyramid structure: there will be more h3 than h2, more h4 than h3. But don't feel obligated to continue all the way down the line. An article might have only one section that's complex enough to go all the way down to h5 and h6, so there won't necessarily be more of them overall than the h2s and h3s. Each number is subordinate to the ones before. But some sections might be missing the subdivisions that you've assigned to h3, so you might jump straight from h2 to h4.

Really there's only one absolute rule: Do not use header tags for formatting. That's what CSS is for.

[Evan_Jose]

As SEO works today, i want to know, "Can i use heading tag as h2, h4, h3, h6, h5?" Like, Is it recommended to use heading tag in sequence (h1, h2, h3, h4,...)?

[NickMNS]

Is it recommended to use heading tag in sequence

It is "recommended" to use h tags, as Lucy24 explains in her post.

In sequence? No h tags are to be used in a tree structure, where h1 is the trunk, h2, the first order branches, h3 branches from h2 etc. That typically leads to one h1, and many of the other tags.

Now the most important thing to note is, "recommended" means, if you don't follow this structure it is unlikely to make any significant difference. Assuming of course that your content is coherent and written in a conventional manner. And flipping things around, if you content is poorly written and incoherent, adding h tags in the "correct sequence" is not going to help much either.

So tl-dr: you should worry more about writing a proper structured article, than worry about the the exact number and placement of h tags. As an added benefit if you write a properly structured article there should be no question where h tags should go.

[edwsteel]

Well, a proper use of H{n} tags makes your article look good, and understandable to humans. It also makes it understandable to robots. I would say, having more or less same keywords (may be rearranged) in Title tag and H1 tag would be a good idea.

[born2run]

Do they have to be in sequence?

[lammert]

No. The h-tags should mark the semantic hierarchy of the content which is not always the same as textual sequence. For example on many eCommerce sites you see the h1 tag used to mark the name of the online shop, and further down again a h1 tag to mark the category or product name. Google is perfectly able to figure out what the meaning and importance is of the different h-tags in the content.