Are Your Headings Up To Speed?

A 5-minute Screaming Frog H Tag Analysis

Heading <h*> tags do matter for your SEO rankings. Placing keywords in your H1 and H2 tags and making your headlines creative and compelling are the two things you need to check your H tags for. This is all apart of your on page seo. But how do you check them if you have hundreds of pages on your site? Hint: you don’t have to work weekends to do this.

Install and Run Screaming Frog SEO Spider

logo - screaming frog

Just head over to Screaming Frog and download the small desktop software for your operating system. About 5 minutes later, you’re ready to rock and roll! Launch the application, type in your root domain, and hit start. Screaming Frog quietly crawls your website and reveals a wealth of information about your meta-data, links, page titles, H1 and H2, and issues with your website. You can access these reports by pressing the buttons on the top panel of your dashboard. But first, let it complete 100%.

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Take a few minutes to absorb the dashboard, because you’ll also need to use it to find out crawl errors, robots info, issues with meta descriptions and titles, broken links, internal links, etc. But for now, let’s hit that H1 button on the top panel.

Analyzing H1 Tags

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You may notice that some of your pages don’t have an H1 at all, while some may be using two or more H1s, which is not an SEO best practice. Moreover, you can also see your H1 headlines and determine if you’d like to tweak some of them and include some keywords right at the beginning, or if you need to make them more catchy.

If you scroll to the right in the same window, you can also see the number of characters in each H1 headline, and the second H1, if any. While there are no strict guidelines as to the length of an H1 tag, I have a personal bias towards keeping it on one line when viewed on a desktop. It is typically best to have just one H1 and then use H2 and H3 if required further in the document.

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Next, you can do the same analysis for H2.

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Add more H2s where you have none or just one. Improve the appeal and structure of you H2s to pique your readers’ interest, and include the keywords right at the beginning, if possible. And that’s it. You’ve optimized your H1 and H2 for search engines and readers.

As you can see, it was much simpler than you had thought!

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