Are Your Headlines Really Headlines?

You already know how to make your story appealing to the eye.

Divide your article into several main parts and separate them visually with line breaks and some words in bold to work as a sub-heading. Easy.

But wait, there’s more than what meets the eye.

Just having a visual separation may not be enough to make your content stand out in Google rankings.

In short,Google favors the content that provides valuable and high-quality answers to something a user was looking for.They understand themselves as an assistant that has the perfect answer to every one of your questions.

To fulfill that mission, they are eager to present the best possible content to answer the user’s search intent.

What they do is send out crawlers to find suitable content and rank it in the order of usefulness to the user. You can see the ranking result on the actual Search Engine Result Page (SERP). The most fitting result should be the first on the list.

When search engines crawl your content, they read through the HTML code of the website and recognize several formatting commands like headlines by tags that look like<h2> This is a Sub-Headline </h2>in the source code.

And Google really loves sub-headlines.

A clear article structure with one big headline and several sub-headlines indicates that your content is thought-through and follows a certain logic.Therefore, chances are high it would be of value to the user.

Also, when crawling the site, Google uses the sum of your sub-headlines to figure out what your content is about and if it really fits the search intent or if it just dealing with a topic on the side.

Lastly, putting relevant keywords into the headlines gives your content a little extra boost in rankings.

Here’s a screenshot of what happens in the Medium editor when you put some words in bold vs. formatting an actual headline:

Doesn’t look that different, does it?

You’re right, the visual separation is also possible with the pseudo headline in bold, so a reader recognizes a new main point of your content is about to start.

But, and this is a big one, Google and the other members of the search engine crew will have a hard time getting to know what your content is really about. Also, it will be de-valued for not providing a clear and logical structure.

If you format the words like an actual headline, it will get the search engine headline bonus and higher the chances of your content ranking in the top places.

While in Medium editor, just highlight the line and make sure one of the capital T’s is shining in green. See the screenshot below how the formatting of a small headline looks like:

On most of your online writing tools, there are pre-programmed formatting options for headlines. Use these to get the structure of your web page not only appealing to the eye but also appealing to Google and the other ones.

By putting your section headline into the right format (and not just in plain bold), you are telling the search engines exactly what your content is about.They will get to know which search intent your content would fit and also give you bonus points for having a good structure.

Photo byonScreenshot by authorScreenshot by author