What are good headings <h1> and subheadings <h2><h3><h4>?

Imagine Google as someone reading a newspaper. Now imagine that the newspaper has no headlines. How does Google know which article they want to read? Without headlines, they’d probably toss the paper aside and grab a different one that DOES have headlines. 

H1 tags are one of the most important things on any webpage. The text in your H1 is the headline on a newspaper. It  should contain keywords that are unique and targeted to the page they’re on. It must also be concise and straight to the point.

Subheadings break the information on a webpage down into manageable chunks so the text doesn’t all run together. Breaking up long runs of text with subheadings and images keeps readers interested so they stay on your page longer. The longer you keep a reader interested, the more likely they are to become a paying customer. And the longer people stay on your website, the lower your bounce rate, which improves your website ranking. 

The best practice for SEO is to have one H1 for the top of your page (our app will flag if you have more than one H1 tag as this hurts your search engine ranking) followed by H2 then H3 subheadings as needed. 

Another important thing to know about your H1 is that google may display it in search results, so you want to be extra careful that it is relevant to your page and will encourage searchers to click through. 

Headings are intended in HTML as short pieces of text (less than a sentence) to break up a page into sections. This is why Google looks for these pieces of text in SEO: they can determine the topics on a page. If a heading is too long - a few sentences or even a paragraph of text - it will likely be ignored by Google for SEO since it does not do what a heading is intended to. All headings should be brief but comprehensive - aim for 3 - 9 words.