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EverWeb’s Heading Tags Widget Explained!

EverWeb’s Heading Tags Widget was introduced in version 1.7. The Widget helps coders easily insert HTML Heading Tags into a web page. That sentence probably makes sense to those of you who have coding experience, but to non-coders out there it may not make much sense. It’s worthwhile exploring the widget in detail as it may help improve your SEO (Search Engine Optimisation), so bear with me…

What is a Heading Tag?
Before I get to answer that question, let’s put Heading Tags in context. When you develop your web pages in EverWeb, you just drag and drop the objects you want to use on to the page and customize them as you need to. When finished, you ‘Publish’ your website and your web pages are converted in to HTML (HyperText Markup Language) code and uploaded to the server that hosts your website.

The HTML code that’s generated is structured as HTML is a language and has rules and guidelines to follow just as any other language form has. The Heading Tag is an HTML ‘language’ element that can be used to explicitly add structure to the code generated by EverWeb. If you take this article as an example, it has a title at the top (‘EverWeb;s Heading Tags Explained’) and headings to break the content in to smaller more manageable parts (e.g. ‘What is a Heading Tag”). The headings could also have sub headings, or even sub-sub headings. If we want, we can explicitly make the titles and headings on our page in to specific HTML Headings using the Heading Tags Widget.

Six levels of Heading are allowed, ranging from the most important (called ‘H1’) to the least important (called ‘H6’). Following our above example we would use an H1 ‘tag’ for the title of our article ‘The Heading Tags Widget’ as it’s the most important heading on the page. The next level of heading, the section titles for the article (e.g. ‘What is a Heading Tag’) would be an H2 tag. Any subheadings would use an H3 Heading Tag and so on down to H6.

Why Use Heading Tags At All?
There are two good reasons for using Heading Tags: the first is that HTML tags can be useful for SEO as search engines can target the headings in the page using the tags you insert. Without the Heading Tags, search engines will just treat your headings as regular text. The second reason for using Heading Tags is to help structure your web page. This is especially useful for those who code in HTML, but less so for EverWeb users as it generates the code for you automatically at publish time.

How to Use the Heading Tags Widget
Probably the best way to use the Heading Tags Widget is to look at an existing page you’ve created and take the most important piece of text on the page and convert it into a Heading Tag. This will probably be the main heading or title on the page itself. To convert this text to a Heading Tag do the following:

  1. First drag and drop the Heading Tags Widget on to your page.
  2. Enter the text you want to use. In this case cut and paste the text e.g. the page title or most important heading on the page, in to the ‘Heading Text’ box.
  3. Next select the level of Heading Text. As this is the most important heading on the page, use H1.
  4. Align the text as you wish using the ‘Text Alignment’ drop down box.
  5. If you want the heading to use an HTML bold styling attribute tick the ‘Use Header Bold Styling’ box.
  6. Use the Fonts Panel to style the Heading Tags Widget text so that it recreates the look of your original page title, or heading, text.
  7. Once you finished creating the Heading Tags Widget, delete the original text title and replace it with the Widget.

Tips on Using the Heading Tags Widget

  1. Use Heading Tags sparingly. If you overuse them, search engines will notice and demote rather than promote your page!
  2. Have one H1 Heading Tag only on the page and some H2 level tags for your main headings. Use H3 tags for any subheadings. You really do not need much more tags than these.
  3. You can have more than one Level of tag on the page e.g. there is more than one heading in this article so I could use multiple H2 tags, one for each heading.
  4. Only use Heading Tags on pages that are important. You won’t need to use Heading Tags on pages such as Contact and About pages. Focus on the pages that are most important to put in front of your visitors.
  5. Don’t compromise your content for the sake of SEO. As with SEO it’s important to balance your visitor’s experience of your website against trying to improve your SEO page ranking result. And that’s especially true when using Heading Tags.

Heading Tags can be a useful addition to your SEO arsenal. If you want to know more on SEO itself, check out our previous post All You Need to Know About SEO in EverWeb.

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2 Comments

  1. This was well written and easy to understand, thanks Simon.

    Kg.

    1. Thanks! 🙂

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