Welcome to the second and last part of our series about headings.

In Part 1 I talked about the importance of headings from a SEO point of view.

Part 2  will focus on the real work: Good practice vs Bad practice

What makes a good heading?

Short

Try and limit the length of the title to 80 characters.

Descriptive

An <h1> title should give a short description of the subject of the page. Visitors as well as search spiders have to know right away what that particular page is about.

Accurate

Make sure the title is correct. Avoid puns, funny one-liners that led people up the garden path. Your visitor wants the info he’s looking for and he wants it NOW! That is a feature of the internet, not a bug.

Keywords

Now let’s try and get surfers to look for a company providing your service on your webpages. Headings can make an important difference.
Try to imagine which keywords people looking for your company's service or product would use. If you're looking for inspiration, there's a cute online tool that doesn't only show you how many times a certain keyword was googled, but also suggests similar search terms and their search volume: the AdWords Keyword Tool. Use those terms in your titles — search engines value keywords in titles higher than those in paragraphs.
Don’t exaggerate, the first and most important purpose is to clarify the content for your visitors. Limit what your page’s about to one subject. But keep in mind that there’s a thin line between intelligent use of keywords and keyword stuffing.

Hometown

For locally based initiatives we strongly advise to use the place name in the <h1> title.

e.g. Sandwich Delivery Amsterdam

There is a good chance that people use the place name in their search engine queries. Make sure your page ranks high for that search.

Unique

Use a different <h1> title on every page. A <h1> relates to the content of that particular page, not to what the website as a whole is about. Every page should have its own <h1>.

Teasing

Next to being clear, a title should tease the audience enough to encourage him to read on.

FAQ headings

A nice trick to absorb a lot of search terms is a good FAQ section on your website. On one page you can provide an overview of all the FAQs. Every FAQ get’s its own page with the question as <h1>. Questions are being googled a lot.

What to avoid when using headings on a web page?

Company name

It might be a good idea to use your company name as an <h1> on the homepage of your website, but on the homepage only. Your website is likely to be found by people searching for it on your company name. No real need to emphasize it any further SEO-wise. If the URL (www.yourcompany.com) of your website is your company name, you’ve got that covered.

Duplicate content

Webcrawlers don’t like duplicate content. They strive to present the best results possible, for which they count on correct information. Using duplicate content is seen as SEO abuse.

Tricks & bad practice

Cloaking: techniques that show different content to search spiders than to visitors of a website.

Abuse of certain SEO techniques is being penalized by loss of ranking or even makes your website disappear entirely from search results.

A simple cloaking example: a couple of years ago certain SEO experts considered it a good idea to stuff sites with keywords in the same colour as the background of the page. Unreadable for the human eye, detected by search robots. Don’t try this at home, because that’s one of the techniques that’s being penalized.

The semantic web – web 3.0

In the early days of HTML, there were tags for the layout of elements. E.g. the deprecated <b> to make text bold, <i> for italic text and <font> for font specifications such as font size, font colour, … In the meantime this is being considered real bad practice. Content and layout should be strictly separated. In HTML5, these kinds of tags are even illegal. And yes, that does mean the internet police will arrest you for breaking digital laws. Search engine algorithms rely on semantic code.

HTML-tags only provide information about the type of content they contain, in HTML5 that's even more true.

The right use of semantic possibilities ensures a high quality web where it’s possible to make your content available for mashup applications and other websites. E.g. an application that lists opening hours of shops in your community.

Semantic code makes it easier for machines to understand your content.

Style

Titles don’t serve to provide text with a different layout, they merely indicate the structure of the page. To take care of layout, use CSS. By giving the titles a different lay out with CSS, you’re making it easy for visitors to scan the text on its value for them on that given time. You get 3 seconds, remember?