On the importance of headings

What is a heading?

A heading should be viewed as a title or a subtitle displayed in the document or a webpage. These are created with the <h1> to <h6> HTML tags where 1 is the largest (and most important) while 6 is the lowest level heading.

The reason to use headings

Headings serve dual purpose in the documents: they help the creators and readers interact with the content and they also affect the way search engines index the webpage.

Human interaction

Having a clearly defined structure with sections and subsections is beneficial for both the creator, who can convey their message better as well as for the readers, who can access the content with ease. Having a few good headings aids scanning and searching for specific information in the document as well as structuring the data contained.

Search engine indexing algorithms

Search engines use the headings to index the structure of the document and point to important keywords.