Headings are a great way to logically divide your post in different sections. Headings help both readers as well as search engines to understand the topics and ideas portrayed in your posts / articles. Search engines recognize the main contents of a post using headings and hence, headings are important for SEO.
What are Headings?
Headings are part of the structure of a website which act as logical divisions for sectioning a website. HTML websites have six different headings h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, and h6. Read more about headings here.
Locating Headings in WordPress Posts
From the dashboard, go to “Posts” > “Add New” to write a new post. To find the heading option in WordPress while writing a new post, simple follow the illustration below:
Using Headings in WordPress Posts
Before you start using headings to structure your WordPress posts, remember that headings are not alternatives for a big font size and a bold font. Instead they have to be treated as SEO tools which tell search engines what your blog post is all about.
Now, your WordPress theme already uses headings h1 and h2 for your blog name, post title, comments title, sidebar widget tiles, and so on. So, we will not mess with h1 and h2 and leave them for the website structure formatting outside of our posts.
You can use h3 and h4 within your posts as follows:
- h3 or “Heading 3”: For a heading within the post
- h4 or “Heading 4”: For a sub-heading within the post
For a sub-sub-heading, you could use h5 or probably just use bold font or a font with a different color.
Changing the Default Font and Size for the Headings
You can go into the CSS code of your WordPress theme to edit the font face and font size of each of the heading tags so that the desired formatting is reflected when you use the headings in your posts.
To edit the CSS, go to the admin dashboard. From the navigation, go to “Appearance” > “Editor” and select “style.css”. In the stylesheet, find the terms h1 / h2 / h3 and so on and make the changes as illustrated below:
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