In WordPress, headings affect your search rankings. According to WordPress search engine guru Yoast:
“The heading structure of your pages is one of the very important aspects of on-page SEO. It defines which parts of your content are important, and how they’re interconnected.”
Joost de Valk, to give him his full name, knows what he’s talking about. He’s the developer of the well known Yoast SEO plugin, which is probably the most complex and comprehensive SEO plugin for WordPress.
This is the second of a two-part series on Headings. Here’s Part One.
H1 is your most important heading.
By default, WordPress puts your site’s title and each page’s or post’s title into an H1 heading. This tells the search engines that it is the most important element on that web page. If you don’t include a keyword in your title, you’re wasting valuable SEO juice!
H2 is also very important.
Some themes, like this one, make your H2 heading the same size as the H1, but Google can still tell the difference. Your most important subheadings should use the H2 tag.
Use H3 headings if you need subheadings under your secondary heading.
Use the H4, H5 and H6 headings to help with your outline if it’s complex, or to make text stand out visually on the page. These are less important for SEO than the H1, H2, and H3 headings.
Regardless of how they look, you should always keep SEO in mind when using H1, H2 and H3 headings.