A Plugin to reveal hidden secrets.
How do you prefer to read content? As a large wall of text, or with intermittent headings that may or may not help you skim through? Chances are it's the second option, and it's the first of MANY similarities you'll share with Google over the next 25 days!
Good heading structure centres around good document structure. It's exactly like writing a High School essay - you need to present your information in a logical order, that makes it easy for the reader to piece information together and build a clear understanding. If you don't clearly name your post, or throw in your conclusion before anything else, your reader is going to struggle to understand.
Headings help break up content, and help give context and structure to what could otherwise be a very overwhelming piece of text. While we may naturally include headings and standard structure for our human readers, our robot friends have a harder time interpreting this information. Enter, coding!
Your website is FULL of code that's invisible to human eyes. Around each piece of text there's what's known as a 'Heading' and 'Body' tags - little pieces of code that signify the importance of each line of text in your post. Generally when making a post in WordPress (and many other platforms), you'll notice there's an option to input text as 'Heading 1,2,3' or 'Normal/Paragraph'. To us humans, all it does it change the size, font, colour or positioning - all determined by your theme.
For search engine robots, these options apply code that clearly shows them your heading, sub-headings and body text. They then use this to understand your content and its focus, and compare it to similar posts across the web. Without correct heading tags - or WORSE, none at all! - search robots become confused and can't determine a clear purpose to your post.
Fixing heading structure is a simple way to improve rankings, but first you have to know WHAT to fix!
Today, we're installing the Stylish plugin for Chrome, which allows you to easily examine heading structure across your site, and identify areas for improvement. We regularly use this tool in bloggersSEO Support, and it's a team favourite - we think it's about time you got on board too.
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