How to use headings on your site • Yoast

Headings help users and search engines to read and understand text. For example, they act as signposts for the readers, making it easier for them to figure out what a post or page is about. Headings also define which parts of your content are essential and show how they’re interconnected. Here, we’ll give you pointers on how to think about headers and use them to improve the readability of your content.

Table of contents

Did you get a red or an orange traffic light for subheading distribution in Yoast SEO? Learn how to distribute them better. Or did Yoast SEO give you feedback on how you use your keyphrase in subheadings? Learn how to improve that.

Why use headings?

Use headings to show text structure

Headings are signposts that guide readers through an article. Therefore, they should indicate what a section or a paragraph is about. Otherwise, people won’t know what to expect.

Readers like to scan content to understand the text and decide which sections they will read. Headings help them do that. Scanning the text becomes significantly harder for your readers when it contains no headings. It’s even worse when you add long stretches of text after a heading. You don’t want to scare off people with the infamous wall of text.

Ensuring your headings are informative to the reader is good practice for web copy. Some people like to tease their audience in the headings, trying to entice them to read further. While that can work well, it’s also easy to get wrong. Remember...