The Page Header is one of the most important elements to telling both a user and a search engine what a certain page is about. Think about what conceptually a "heading" actually is. A "heading" is a stand-alone phrase that describes the block(s) of content that appear below it. If one is trying to quickly get a sense of what is contained in a document, the heading is a great place to start.

To think about how headers on a webpage work, think about a restaurant's menu. You can flip through any restaurant's menu and at a glance, get a sense for what they serve there. If you open it to the first page and you see Salads, Meat, and Pasta, you get a very definite sense of what they serve at that restaurant. Page headings work the exact same way - They provide a quick cut at what a web page is about right off the bat.

For example, on HubSpot.com, we use headings like Internet Marketing Software Products over one that says Our Products. This is because the first heading tells search engines something about what is on the page and what HubSpot does, and the second one doesn't say anything.

But just because some words look like a "heading" to humans doesn't mean they look that way to the search engines. There is a special way to "tag" words on your pages so they look like headings to search engines when they crawl your page.

In general, you can't just look at the web page and know whether or not the headings are tagged appropriately for the search engines. To check this, you need to view the source HTML. You can right-click on a web page and select "view source" or "view page source". A new window will open that shows you the HTML behind the page. A true heading will be wrapped in a tag that starts with <h1> and ends with </h1>. There are other headers with smaller sizings available as well, from h2 to h6. Their importance on the page scales down with their size, so that you can indicated more or less important content down a page using this tag.

For example: <h1>Internet Marketing Software Products </h1>.

When writing headings for your pages, consider the following guidelines:

• Use target keywords.
• Keep the headings as short as possible so that your target keywords get maximum weight (The same principle as in the page title and URL).
• Use a single h1 header on each page, and use multiple h2 and h3 headers.

Note for HubSpot CMS Users

If you are using the HubSpot CMS, it's very easy to tag a block of text as a heading. Click More on the page edit control and select the proper heading tag from the drop-down menu on the left-hand side. Every module is also equipped with a header automatically. Just click on the header to edit it on the page. That's it!