The Importance of Text & Heading Structure of Website Content for Optimal SEO Performance

Strong website content is the cornerstone of having a successful website. By writing unique rich content that gives value to the user your website content will be strong, couple this strong content with great marketing/SEO and your site should soar up the rankings of the SERP (Search Engine Results Page). Most people are familiar with…

Website SEO Performance

Strong website content is the cornerstone of having a successful website. By writing unique rich content that gives value to the user your website content will be strong, couple this strong content with great marketing/SEO and your site should soar up the rankings of the SERP (Search Engine Results Page).

Most people are familiar with the most common form of SEO for content which is optimising each key page with a unique Meta Title and Description. However there is further SEO that can and should be done to ensure your content ranks highly that many people aren’t aware of such as the importance of text structure and the importance of the successful implementation of a heading structure (H1, H2, H3 Etc..) on your page of content.

Text Structure is important as the structure of the texts on your site is very important for SEO. If your content is clearly structured, your chance to rank well in Google will be much higher. Before people choose to read content they do what is called a quick scan of the content. This is where they will run their eyes quickly over to content to get a quick feel for it before they commit to starting to properly read it. You need to hook the user from this scan to convince them to read it otherwise you have lost them.

This is where text structure becomes ever so important as the main parts that tend to catch people’s eyes when they scan over content is the beginning of sentences as people read left to right and secondly and probably most importantly what catches people’s eyes are headings and subheadings. Headings and subheadings will usually be in bold and also be centered so they really stand out easily, the headings and subheadings should be an accurate description of the content that lays beneath it. If these headings and subheadings are intriguing enough to convince the user to read the article after scanning then they have done their job!

Now that the importance of text structure has been explained, how directly linked the importance of heading structure to compliment it will also become quite apparent. As explained above headings and subheadings should be attractive and should clearly state the content of the paragraph beneath it. Best practice is to put a header above every long paragraph or above a group of paragraphs which are talking about a similar theme or topic.  

Header tags (H1, H2, H3 Etc..) are important for SEO because they communicate to search engines like google what your website and what that specific page is about. Search engines recognize the copy in your header tags as more important than the rest so it understands from this what your page is about. H1 is seen by Google as the most important then H2, H3 etc. It’s important to utilize your header tags however and not just throw them in anywhere and everywhere. To utilize header tags effectively for SEO they should contain your keywords which you hope to rank for. This is so effective as part of an SEO strategy because when search engines routinely crawl the website they will pick up on the header tags and will recognize the keywords you are using are important and are directly linked to what your website is about.

To find out more about the best way to employ effective content writing and other strategies to improve your website Contact 2Cubed today!