In today’s article “Fixing Subheading Distribution” we have explained the importance of proper heading distribution in your article.
Whenever you want to know about a topic, you read posts and articles about it. But after the first few articles, reading every single word seems to be a chore. You scroll further and further, and at the end, you end up reading only the bold text, this is where subheading distribution comes handy.
This is the basic reason for creating headings in any document which has over 300 words.
Readers always will look at the headings first and then decide what part of your webpage might be relevant for them. This means that texts without headings often go unread, even if they contain the highest quality content. This problem can develop so much, that when readers don’t find content with headings, they might just leave your website without reading a single word.
The result would be that your bounce rate will skyrocket and traffic will decrease. Hence a proper subheading distribution is a must for your article.
Subheading Distribution:
This is where subheadings come into play. Any heading text that comes after the title of your page, will fall under subheadings. This text is essential for any modern webpage to be even considered for reading.
Usage of Subheading Distribution:
Subheadings have multiple uses that can affect the overall outlook of your content. The practical uses are there, but so is an aesthetic appeal.
1. Headings act as the guide of the text
As discussed above, the primary function of headings is to guide the readers of the text through the page, to understand what the content is about. They can easily pinpoint whatever part might apply to them.
Beyond this, headings also act as milestones of sorts. They break a huge chunk of text into multiple small readable parts. This buffer they create makes it easier and more enjoyable to read the text and understand it.
The understanding of the readers gets boosted when you form a map for them to easily understand the information presented and imbibe it within them
2. Subheading Distribution influence SEO
Headings very much affect the SEO of the page. They are easily read by crawlers and the keywords that are added to these headings can increase the overall rating of the page.
It becomes easier for the search engine to understand what the page is all about. This will contribute to decreasing your bounce rate and increasing revisits as only the people who will find the content relevant will be coming to the website.
3. Subheading make your content accessible
The headings of the page are in HTML. This helps the people who cannot read from screens to easily use read aloud software for the same. The HTML coding helps the readers identify the headings and read them accordingly.
How to properly use Subheading Distribution?
As discussed above, the uses of subheadings are to make the users understand what we write in different parts of the content, you need to do exactly this. You need to write in the headings what the paragraphs are about. This is done by creating a hierarchy.
Start by putting a heading over every long paragraph. The next part is deciding what parts fall under a greater category.
Proper Subheading Distribution:
There are 6 heading tags ranging from h1 to h6. They are supposed to be used with your headings to mark in the HTML coding that these words are the headings. We only use the h1 tag for the title of the page that will be visible on the top. This means it will only be used once per webpage.
The other tags: h2, h3 and so on are used for h1’s subheadings, and then subheadings of these subheadings and so on, respectively. This is how the “H” tags are identified by the search engines.
So the “H” tags follow the same hierarchy as a list, where you list the major heads first and then the lower ones under these major heads.
Consider the following example for a better understanding of the concept:
Different Types of foods(h1)
Raw (h2)
Fruits (h3)
Vegetables(h3)
Fungi (h3)
Cooked (h2)
Healthy (h3)
Unhealthy (h3)
It is clear from this example you have to create a hierarchy of bigger heads, under which your main content will fall.
How to create Headings:
For creating headings, essentially, you attach a heading tag to the text you want to mark as a heading. The only change that occurs is in the HTML code as the inclusion of the tags.
To make this change, you have different options:
- Manually Edit the code
For this, just open the document containing the code, and add the <h(number)> tag before and the </h(number)> tag after the text to be made into a heading. There are other add-ons possible to the tag, but this will work too.
- Select the Heading type in the text editor
In the editor, as per the editor you are using, it differs slightly.
For the old editor, in the formatting toolbar, select the heading type from the drop-down menu for the text.
In the new editor, click on the + button and select the heading type.
Concluding Subheading Distribution:
Subheadings highly affect the readability of your text. It is thus advisable to take proper consideration of where the inclusion of subheading can benefit the reader and increase the total understandability of the text.
Next Lecture: Perfect size of Paragraphs